Landless: Lúireach review | Jude Rogers’ folk album

(Glitterbeat)
Four powerful voices weave tender yet disquieting harmonies on a second album that honours bold women

Vocal harmony is in the dense weave of so much traditional music, and it becomes a startling, golden thread in Landless’s second album. Named after an Irish word that can mean a cloak for protection, a breastplate and a hymn, Lúireach is a collection of 10 sublime songs, many of them about bold women. It also showcases four female singers (Méabh Meir, Lily Power, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch), whose voices seem to rise from the sacra of their spines, emerging from their bodies in heavenly flight or heavy drones.

As ancient, deep and moving as an unusual early music instrument, Meir’s tones are the first that we hear, on The Newry Highwayman. She is joined by her bandmates in tender support, plus Alex Borwick’s soft, sighing trombone, string drones played by Lankum’s Cormac Mac Diarmada, and the growing dread that’s such a signature flourish of John “Spud” Murphy’s production (for Lankum and others). Then comes a sweet, unusual version of folk standard Blackwaterside, learned from Irish Traveller Paddy Doran, showcasing the group’s similar facility and respect for lightness and darkness.