…And Take the Black Worm with Me

A founding member of Irish experimental folk outfit Lankum, as well as lecturer and researcher on the history of Irish traditional music (see podcast Fire Draw Near), Ian Lynch has become an authority on the stories and sounds that make-up the tradition’s most well-known tunes. It’s only fitting then that his first solo album under his One Leg One Eye moniker should push these conventions to their extremes.

Opening track ‘Glistening, She Emerges’ is a wash of black metal drones and the distorted uilleann pipes. Follow-up, ‘Bold and Undaunted Youth’ is 13-and-a-half minutes of creeping, sinister synths, disquieting lyrics and a dual vocal line that is less two voices singing together and more a solo voice duetting alone with its own echo. This in many ways characterises much of … And Take the Black Worm with Me, and far from the collective focus of a session, or even the co-active creations of his band, Lynch’s brand of gnarled trad feels heavy with solipsism – a loud, lone voice in the dark, accompanied only by its surroundings. And yet there’s a haunting hopefulness in the form of closer ‘Only the Diceys’ – its seraphic harmonies providing a light in the darkness.