Music / Reviews
Review: Lankum, Bristol Beacon – ‘Jaw-dropping performance’
Lankum’s ascent has been remarkable. The Dublin quartet – whose formidable live presence previously tore through Fiddlers and SWX – are now able to sell out Bristol’s biggest concert hall.
Their fourth album False Lankum sat high on most critics’ 2023 lists, uniting fans of alternative music far beyond the folk scene. Being the best at what you do can still lead to success, even if you specialise in ten minute drone epics about as comforting as a danse macabre.
Over 20 years Lankum have become a masterful unit, summoning uncanny soundscapes from the reeds of pipes, concertina and harmonium, and toying with harmony and dissonance to hair-raising effect.
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Vocal duties are shared around, with affable frontman Ian Lynch taking the lion’s share of the leads, while Radie Peat’s jaw-dropping performances provide the evening’s most dramatic moments.
The evening starts with tour support from Rachael Lavelle, a fellow Dubliner whose songs are framed by new age synth pads and swells of sub bass, bringing to mind a production hybrid of Enya and James Blake.
Lavelle’s strongest suit is her voice, and her best tunes make use of startling vocal effects. Her material varies in quality, but she’s surely won plenty of admirers here in Bristol.
Lankum’s reputation as doom-mongers is at least partly justified. Their version of The Wild Rover is drastically bleak compared to the devil-may-care drinking song it’s generally known as, and they lean hard into the darkness of The Pogues’ The Old Main Drag with an arrangement that becomes ever-more discordant as its narrator’s life unravels.
But aside from a few apocalyptic moments, such as the airless dirge that swallows Go Dig My Grave, Lankum’s music tells of a world in which love and death, grief and joy exist side by side.
The Young People, one of their finest originals, could hardly be more poignant. On a Monday Morning – also sung by guitarist Daragh Lynch – is a bleary-eyed comedown classic.
Meanwhile, Bear Creek is a defiant, life-affirming instrumental that showcases the fiddle-playing chops of Cormac Mac Diarmada, and it sends us home on something that feels suspiciously like a high.
Far from taking themselves too seriously, the band members amuse the crowd with anecdotes about Bono, Sting and a New Year’s Eve in The Bear Pit.
It’s hard to imagine where this band could play in Bristol if they get any bigger, but right now the Beacon is theirs.
All photographs © Ben Wilson/Soul Media Photography
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