Album of the Week: Poor Creature – All Smiles Tonight
All Smiles Tonight is the debut album from Dublin contemporary folk trio Poor Creature, made up of Ruth Clinton (Landless), Cormac Mac Diarmada (Lankum), and John Dermody (The Jimmy Cake). From the opening track, a version of Adieu Lovely Eireann, it becomes clear that the label contemporary folk should be taken fairly loosely.
While the songs have their roots in folk tradition, the instrumentation and overall aesthetic are largely removed from any general, preconceived ideas one might have about the genre. This is music less attached to folk as it’s typically known than the four-part harmony of Landless and the doom-folk of Lankum that listeners may already be attuned to.
The Whole Town Knows pushes things even further from tradition. Built around a trancey, cyclical, almost big-beat drum pattern from Dermody, it lays a pulsing groove over which Clinton and Mac Diarmada’s voices glide. When the voices vanish mid-way through, the space they leave behind is filled by a dense layering of drones and clangs that give the track’s conclusion a dark, cinematic quality, not unlike some of the heavier, more abstract moments on Lankum’s False Lankum.
Throughout the album, Clinton’s light-as-air singing is often its vital component. Here, supported by full instrumental arrangements, her drifting voice gains a strange power, patient, calm and clear, but constantly being offset and reshaped and recontextualised by the sound around it.
An Draighneán Donn is a perfect example, and one of the album’s highlights. It pushes even further into the outer reaches of folk, emphasising the eerie, dreamlike quality inherent in the centuries-old songs the trio choose to reimagine. Clinton’s gentle, reverbed, and layered voice takes on a spectral presence, filling a wide, glassy expanse before being joined by monstrous organ drones and accompanying voices, creating a spell-binding cacophony, only to combust and subside instantaneously, leaving an outro of swaying fiddle. It evokes a kind of trad-gaze sensibility, a fusion of traditional folk elements with the expansive, disorienting textures of shoegaze.
It also brings to mind a recurring thought of mine. Whenever I return to Sinéad O’Connor’s debut, The Lion and The Cobra, I’m struck by how otherworldly she sounds, and I wonder if she was listening to, or perhaps consciously channelling, Elizabeth Fraser’s ethereal delivery on Cocteau Twins records. With that in mind, there’s a similar dream-pop-but-most-definitely-not about Poor Creature. Yet there is a glacial, unreal sheen that clings to these folk songs, casting them in a strange, shimmering light. In this respect All Smiles Tonight may be a close relative of Fermanagh artist Roís’ excellent debut MO LÉAN, released last year, which presented a fascinating and immersive gothic-folk-gaze reinterpretation of keening songs.
The rendition of Hick’s Farewell is another album standout. Stark, desolate, and apocalyptic, it beats out a slow, funereal rhythm while Clinton delivers vocals full of deathly desperation. Cascades of whirling fiddle elevate the track into something arresting and almost time-suspending. It’s suitably brooding, moody and magical. That same atmosphere carries into the ten-minute retelling of Willie O, which conjures something that’s more post-rock than folk. But instead of erupting or building toward an obvious climax, it relies on subtle swells and waves of sound that soothe and disturb in equal measure. It’s genuinely moving and absorbing.
All Smiles Tonight is another notable addition to the evolving canon of contemporary Irish folk, and all the more compelling for its refusal to adhere to any fixed idea of what that might mean.
Poor Creature – All Smiles Tonight is OUT NOW on Vinyl & CD