Lankum: False Lankum (Rough Trade/digital outlets)

One of Elsewhere's best of 2019 albums was The Livelong Day by Ireland's exceptional trad-cum-alt-folk outfit Lankum.

And that's from one who doesn't naturally gravitate towards the folk genre.

But Lankum's compelling drone (closer to Velvet Underground than hey-nonny songs) and their pulling apart of the traditional Wild Rover was, and remains, enthralling.

That Velvets connection appears again on this striking collection in the doom-laden opener Go Dig My Grave with is searing fiddle and foreboding drums. As with the 10 minute Wild Rover which opened The Livelong Day, this gothic tale of love, disappointment and suicide weighs in at a compulsive eight-plus minutes.

It is followed by the three minute introduction to Clear Away in the Morning with scraped fiddle, moody acoustic guitar and an uneasy atmospherics before the gentle vocal enters to sing of a sailor yearning for the uncertain life at sea over that of being ashore.

Lankum do not offer you an easy inroad on this album of mostly songs of life (and largely death) at sea where misfits and murderers are as common than life-threatening eddies and lashing storms.

The dark, menacing beauty of their sonic settings (the short interpolated fugue sections are appropriately unsettling), raw vocal harmonies and the enchantingly direct voice of Lorelei Peat (born to sing these songs, although maybe born two centuries ago) bring this album into the disturbed present.

The centrepiece of the traditional New York Trader initially sounds jolly enough but the story is of a brutal, killer captain planning to starve his crew, and -- those who survive the storm which washes many overboard -- become so despairing and desperate they throw him into the dark deep.

On their arrival in New York “the people wondered much to see such a poor distressed and shipwreck crew were we”. The conclusion is almost redundant: “So sailors all where'er you be, a warning pray you take by me. As you love your life won't yous take good care and never go sailing with a murderer”.

Lord Abore and Mary Flynn is another traditional ballad (mother poisons her 13-year old son to prevent him from seeing his love Mary Flynn, spoiler alert: Mary dies too) so you don't come to this album for the laughs.

And they don't send you off on a positive note: the 13 minute closer The Turn is a kind of life's-shit-then-you-die lyric and a strident beat pushing it towards the final half of crushing claustrophobia driven home by thumping bodhran. The droning vocals are increasingly buried before the discordant post-rock noise of the final minutes which sounds beamed in from a Radiohead album.

This is not for everyone (especially if you are uneasy on the ocean) but this extraordinary, demanding and transfixing double vinyl album confirms this four-piece from Dublin can grip with a skinny hand and glittering eye, deliver ancient stories of mariners and watery graves, and leave you sadder and wiser.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here