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ØXN – CYRM (2023)
Review:
The first signing in 18 years to the recently revived Irish traditional label Claddagh Records, ØXN are a band that named themselves after castrated draft animals – “sometimes worshipped, sometimes doomed for domestication,” they say. ØXN don’t trip around in folk’s gentler pastures. They comprise singer/keyboardist/guitarist Katie Kim, drummer Eleanor Myler of experimental rock band Percolator, and two members of the Mercury-nominated Lankum: Radie Peat, her voice as raw and jagged as a glistening oyster shell, and their drone-loving producer, John “Spud” Murphy. This 45-minute, six-track debut LP begins with the traditional ‘Cruel Mother’, about a woman killing her newborns after becoming pregnant by a married man. After a long stretch of Peat’s voice a cappella, as in some of Lankum’s most powerful tracks, the mood shifts elsewhere: minor-key guitar arpeggios recalling the post-punk days of the Cure, and drums slowly building towards raucous workouts. As Peat returns to the refrain “all alone and lonely”, this setting has a fascinating effect, making the listener think of today’s women suffering oppression, alongside others long gone. Peat also leads the first single Love Henry, which builds to a fuzzy clamour of madness, and Maija Sofia’s contemporary ballad, The Wife of Michael Cleary, about an Irishman who burned his wife to death in 1895, claiming she was a changeling. Kim’s vocals offer the songs very different but no less striking qualities: shades of White Chalk-era PJ Harvey on a piano-led version of The Trees They Do Grow High, Emiliana Torrini on the folky original The Feast, and full-blown goth queen dynamics on a 13-minute rout through Scott Walker’s Farmer in the City against burbling synthesisers and noise rock distortion. It’s a fittingly terrifying finale to a debut full of unsettling dark magic. — Guardian
Track List:
01 - Cruel Mother
02 - The Trees They Do Grow High
03 - Love Henry
04 - The Feast
05 - The Wife of Michael Cleary
06 - Farmer in he City
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Country: Ireland
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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