The Galway musician Olan Monk tends to eschew the ethos or idea of recorded music, viewing each such instance as a transience or even a lapse which unduly separates a composition from the flow of lived experience which birthed it.
That experience – described on their 2020 album Love/Dead for instance as one of dragging a harmonium down from a bedroom into a courtyard and playing it until the bellows burst or the distinctive roar of a ferry engine and the spurt of salt water as they made their annual summer pilgrimage to the Aran island of Inis Oírr, memories often made in the company of friends – plays as though on a loop in one’s mind, infuses one’s spirit or may be felt still somehow tangibly, an active force which might emanate at any one moment from the nape or spine right down through one’s fingertips.
With a sense of the absurdity which lies in performing to nobody or equally in giving all of one’s self to the faceless and desensitising churn of a commercial machine, they are also allegedly responsible for some of the murkiest yet most memorable projects of the past few years, like the self-titled Princ€ss album which has also been linked to the dream treader Maria Somerville, who appears twice here on Monk’s latest Songs for Nothing.
Songs for Nothing is billed as a return home to the west coast of Ireland, drawing its inspiration from the unadorned and melismatic tradition of sean-nós singing with its love songs and laments or the pithy and sometimes confessional songwriting of the late Sinéad O’Connor. That may be true when it comes to the lyrics and Monk’s familiar penchant for melody but here the texture or fabric is for the most part grunge and gauze, a motley blend of alternative stylings which might stretch from My Bloody Valentine to Sunn O))) and take in briefly the angularity of Pavement or Shellac while touching upon emo and even nu-metal yet for all that reminds me mostly of the Smashing Pumpkins as they shifted from Mellon Collie to Adore.
There are some notable exceptions like the plunking piano keys, sawn violin strings and rumbling drums which introduce the album on ‘Corp’ – not for the last time on Songs for Nothing conjuring an uncanny mix of Irish traditional music, tanpura-like drones and Suicide by way of Martin Rev’s compressed use of the drum machine – or the orchestral sweep and percussive lurch of ‘Can’t Wait’ redolent of the music hall and the bubblegum refrains of ‘Fate (Reprise)’ featuring Somerville, a decidedly cleaned up take on the original from Love/Dead with its staticky electroclash.
Most stunning is the album closer ‘Amhrán Mhaínse’. A surging and swelling, snot green and purple deep instrumental composition featuring the accordion as performed by Peadar-Tom Mercier, the song is a take on a traditional sean-nós lament supposedly written by a woman from Mhuighinse, a place near Carna in County Galway, setting out the arrangements for her wake, funeral and eventual burial as she lay succumbing to the ravages of time on her deathbed.
Elsewhere strings and winds sweeten the air or loom like brackish spectres behind the propulsive riffs of Olan Monk’s guitar. The artist also plays the accordion on ‘Blank Page’ while Mercier on the violin and Risteárd Ó hAodha on the cello shift between drones and embellishments, contributing separately to eight of the record’s ten tracks. Róisín Berkeley on the harp and Dylan Kerr on the flute feature on ’10 Days’ and Aindriú de Buitléir plays the bodhrán drum on ‘Corp’ and the outro to the foreboding ‘Drón Feadóige’, one of a handful of pieces to make fleeting not to say apparitional use of Monk’s tin whistle.
Twisting together tangled and impossible sentiments, Monk together with Somerville on ‘Down 3’ intones ‘if you love someone then you should let them go / and if you want to be with someone let them know / and if you love someone then you should let them down / and if you want to be with someone stick around’ both miming triteness and identifying the despondency in presence.
Limned by the orchestral loop, on the industrial ‘Can’t Wait’ – which is introduced by a field recording of footsteps in the sand and squawking seagulls, blowing winds and a heaviness of breath – they sing ‘I need to know if this was a mistake / I need to know what mistakes were vacant / I need to know how real is the feeling / I need to chase what I can believe in’ a kind of meditation which sees mistakes as portals but is tired and leery as it cedes to the void.
And ‘tell me / how can I show / you / you that I want to’ they and Somerville repeat on ‘Fate (Reprise)’ before a ribbon of distorted guitar leads us into the last freewheeling and swashbuckling track. County Galway continues to furnish the world with fine musicians whether traditional singers and instrumentalists or those mucking together local customs with popular forms, like Somerville for instance, the dark folk singer Maija Sofia or pigbaby whose i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do was one of the most curious records of last year. Looking out over Galway Bay and towards the Atlantic, for their part Olan Monk says that Songs for Nothing comes ‘dedicated to Conamara and all who have called it home’.
