A black cloud makes its means throughout Glastonbury Competition’s Park degree – despite the fact that nowadays it’s a metaphorical one, for the bleakness that Dublin people workforce Lankum carry feels fully misplaced within the present surroundings of gleaming solar that shines its means in a cheery halo across the space. In an identical spirit, the band’s efficiency is one in every of polarity; nice depression and intense pleasure, ebullient jigs and dismal doom. And in a phrase, the enjoy is impressive.
After welcoming their crowd of “attractive weirdos” – the band are regularly heat and witty – Lankum creep into their ten-minute duvet of conventional people track The Wild Rover from 2019’s The Livelong Day. The group are eerily silent (which is spectacular, for this repeatedly chatty Glastonbury lot) as strings construct right into a see-sawing, foreboding melody to frontwoman Radie Peat’s bewitching voice, who’s quickly joined by way of the remainder of her band – Ian Lynch, Daragh Lynch and Cormac MacDiarmada – in haunting cohesion. Then, the strings bend, aching and swelling all of the extra into chasm-deep wells of dread. Lankum’s sense of doom is each aggravating but euphoric, a sad, superb rebirth of the senses that reveals its means into every in their following songs.
Tears waft freely from the target market throughout The Rocks of Palestine – a shocking acapella rewrite of Arcady’s The Rocks of Bawn to characteristic lyrics concerning the ongoing tragedy in Gaza. ‘Unfastened Palestine’ chants start, ahead of Peat remarks her pride over seeing such a lot of Palestine flags and keffiyeh’s within the target market. Then, she dryly quips: “Just right success to the BBC for modifying that one out!’.
On the finish of The Pleasure of Petravore, any other people reimagining that provides the unique extra of a discordant, piratical edge, they log off with a passage of Sting’s We Paintings The Black Seam. Ian then broadcasts with a depraved grin how The Police legend is a huge fan in their paintings, hanging on his best possible affect as he remembers how he as soon as described Lankum as “fucking fatal”.
In other places, they dip into the standard Irish songbook once more with The Rocky Highway To Dublin, their layers of vocal cohesion lacing in a soul-stirring, uplifting mix. Now not handiest does this second really feel misplaced within the surrounding climate, but in addition out of time – a mesmerising adventure again to darkish, rain-beaten nights in Eire centuries in the past.
Photographs of grisly landscapes echo within the thoughts later for the remaining Cross Dig My Grave from 2023’s Mercury Award-nominated False Lankum, its overwhelming cacophony bleeding out into the most efficient people horror soundtrack by no means written. As they end, the traumatic shoulders and held-breaths of the group give out into roaring, satiated applause, and the momentarily, oh-so-deliciously darkish nook of Glastonbury returns to its former, now relatively extra abnormal gentle.
