PROGRESSIVE FOLK

PAUL SEXTON travels to the Emerald Isle and beyond in search of prog gold.

County Cavan’s Lisa O’Neill has been plying her trade for many a moon, but her rising stock is taking her to ever bigger stages with the genuinely unique All Of

This Is Chance (Rough Trade). Her singular voice and tone have a hypnotic, sometimes almost robotic quality, atmospherically pitched at the intersection between speaking and singing. These are stories of the land in the great Irish tradition, ruminating literally on the birds, bees and berries, but O’Neill’s extraordinary delivery and some beautiful instrumentation lend a daringly modern hue. The album has already topped the UK’s Americana chart, and the Mercury Prize will surely recognise its charms.

Seven years after Belfast’s Mark McCambridge debuted as Arborist with Home Burial, and three since the equally admired follow-up A Northern View,

he’s back to crush more genre ground rules into the dust with

An Endless Sequence of Dead Zeros

(Kirkinriola). Comparisons with John Cale and Bill Fay serve as partial summary, but there’s an off-kilter appeal here at the weirder end of Americana. The opening

Dreaming In Another Language takes an insistent melody and makes it trippy, while Matisse could be a Fleet Foxes number and Black Halo is all pedal-steel charm. Dewdrop Cherryoak is, by McCambridge’s own description, a “Neil Young lament”. It’s captivating stuff.

Dublin quartet Lankum are another band who’ve been quietly getting on with expanding their horizons, as evidenced by a busy 2023 calendar both at home and in Europe. False

Lankum is their fourth album and third for Rough Trade, and it combines pristine melodies with some irresistibly jarring sonics to keep the listener alert and sometimes alarmed. After the simple folky charms of the opening, time-honoured composition Go Dig My Grave, there’s a nagging discordance in counterpoint to their melodies, especially in the between-songs fugues, as if they were recording in a haunted house. Rarely has folk been so beguilingly shadowy.

Singer, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist Ruth Angell’s solo debut, Hlywing, takes its name from an old English word for shelter and refuge. That’s exactly what you take from an entirely elegant set of songs, beautifully arranged and sung by an artist who has charmed many of us in her performances with Fairport/Steeleye’s Ashley Hutchings.

Finishing at the poppier end of town, Midwestern songwriter Eric D Johnson is back at the helm of Fruit Bats for the selfproduced A River Running to Your

Heart (Merge), which thrives on pristine tuneage, notably on Rushin’

River Valley, a charming love song to his wife, the shimmering See The

World By Night and the captivating

It All Comes Back.