Radie Peat: No Human Tongue Can Tell review – Glorious album from a voice that conveys vulnerability, anger and defiance all at once

Résumé détaillé

Radie Peat’s debut solo album is an Irish ghost story weighed down with centuries of accumulated trauma and lifted high by a voice that, even at its softest, bites like a cruel…

Radie Peat’s debut solo album is an Irish ghost story weighed down with centuries of accumulated trauma and lifted high by a voice that, even at its softest, bites like a cruel wind coming in off a lonely bog.

The Lankum singer has described the record as reflecting her wish to sound like a “dark Enya” – an effect she achieves stunningly on an LP that taps into the dread and pain that run like ley lines through much of traditional Irish folk.

Peat has worked on No Human Tongue Can Tell since 2021, a period during which Lankum have become the toast of critics in Britain (where they earned a Mercury Prize nomination) and the singer, from Artane in Dublin, has become a parent.

You can hear the care and caution she has invested in the project over that time on the album’s beautifully rendered opening track, Hares on the Mountain. The song is an unsettling ballad, made famous by Shirley Collins, that sketches out a nightmare scenario in which cocky young men are turned into animals and the women they have pursued so eagerly consider whether to hunt them for sport.

The tune is a lesson in the power of silence as Peat, working with the Lankum producer John “Spud” Murphy, strips away the music to bare instrumentation as a way of foregrounding a voice that constantly sounds as if it’s building towards one or other sort of catharsis.

That disquieting effect carries through to the album’s high point, in the form of the near-seven-minute The Moon and Stars. Here is a throbbing tour de force, breathtaking in its terrible beauty, as Peat’s keening vocals are paired with marching-band drums that morph into a trip-hop-style fade-out.

Dark Enya? It’s more like Björk crossing the Styx in a leaky rowing boat (in addition to calling back to Peat’s collaborations with Kneecap, in particular the early number 3Cag).

She travels deeper into the underworld on Willow Garden. Recounting the case of a man facing the gallows after murdering his lover, it grabs you by the guts and taps into the spirit…

Début de l'article, extrait de The Irish Times. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.