Lúireach

Landless are a female vocal quartet – Ruth Clinton, Sinéad Lynch, Méabh Meir, Lily Power – newly into their second decade together who share a glancing kinship with Lisa O’Neill’s recent Top of the World selection All of This is Chance (reviewed March 2023). Lúireach, the long-awaited follow-up to their 2018 debut Bleaching Bones finds the previously a cappella foursome deftly adding subterranean-disguised instrumental accompaniment to a mesmeric ten-track collation of traditional and new material. Translating from the Irish as a ‘protective breastplate’ or ‘hymn for protection,’ Lúireach positions Landless as kindred spirits to classical ensemble Anonymous 4 in the foregrounding of the often melancholic female experience. Two tracks are purely a cappella – a lilting but high-lying take on ‘Blackwaterside’ and a dark-hued ‘My Lagan Love’. Elsewhere, the addition of Ruth Clinton’s pipe organ and Cormac MacDiarmada’s strings on ‘Lúireach Bhrídé’ haloes a hymn to Brigid, ‘goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft.’ Clinton’s clavichord punctuates Lynch’s new melody for the 17th-century poem ‘The Hag’ with porcelain delicacy, the plangent Slovak lament for a dead hussar, ‘Ej Husari’, floating forlornly on strings and Méabh Meir’s shruti box and singing bowls. Reunited with producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy, with Lúireach, Landless deliver a mesmeric listen that makes one hope for a shorter wait for their next offering.