…And take The Black Worm With Me is the expanded edition of this 2022 solo project of Lankum mainman Ian Lynch, in collaboration with George Brennan who recorded this album in and around Dublin, in a variety of abandoned buildings with Ruth Clinton and Laurie Sue Shanaman adding organ and some of the vocals. The album was mixed and produced by John Murphy and Mastered by Harvey Birrell.
The album opens with the ambient dronescape of Glistening, She Emerges from tonal wailing, shape shifting maelstrom of noise, eventually sounding like a chanter has been double tracked for darker spatiality.
Sympathetic Invertebrate Ritual has a slow dark narration in a similar style to some of Telefis more spoke word pieces, slowly bird song and long-drawn-out tones stretch things out while you ruminate on just what they have been taking about. The voices babble in your head making you wonder did he really drop those bombs and who did he drop them on.
Bold And Undaunted youth is a 13 minute song that starts almost acapella folk style, set to what could be a Tibetan singing bowl tone, while we find out what happened to him at seventeen, carefully enunciated, this unfurls incrementally, explaining what his hearts delight really is, ambient noise increases until it feels like you are speeding through a tunnel on an open top train carriage.
I'd Rather Be Tending My Sheep than listening to a long slow building drone, that this bewitching tale unfolds over, were you really with the king marching off to war once more, the title being the lament of the poor conscripts, who really would rather be at home on the farm tending the sheep, than killing and marauding with the army, the king can keep his shilling, while this develops into a slow moribund elegy for the despair of conscripted soldiers.
The Fancy Cannot Cheat So Well so instead they let the amps buzz and mutate with the pipes droning on, odd bashing of metal and wood atmospherically building, before it sounds like barrels rolling down a slope disconsolately. The album closes with Only The Diceys a slow sorrowful lament for someone who needs the strength of ten drowning men, this is a rather beautiful closing song.
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