John Francis Flynn + Marlais

When you imagine Ireland, you often fantasize about rolling hills, giants, saints and snakes. On John Francis Flynn's second album Look Over The Wall, See The Sky, he hints at this too: a crystal goblet filled with bright green crème de menthe resting on a moss-covered ledge, perfectly realizing this idea of Ireland in a way that is as funny as it is poignant.

But if you have to imagine Ireland at all, then you're probably not all that familiar with its reality: the towering glass giants of Google and Facebook, the unaffordable luxury hotels along the Liffey amid a homelessness epidemic and the highest rents in Europe.

On his new single Mole In The Ground, a cover of an American anti-establishment folk song recorded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928, John evokes the rebellious energy he felt in his native Dublin when it was "being torn to pieces by property developers and vulture funds".

In his interpretation, John lets the surrealism of the song take centre stage by speaking the lyrics rather than singing them. By removing the nursery rhyme-like melody, we focus instead on our narrator's strange fantasies and desires. His voice also lies beneath the melody, which captures the song's dark, hallucinatory mood: "I don't like the railroad man/The railroad man will kill you when he can/ and he'll drink up your blood like red wine".

Listening to this album is like experiencing the story through a modern lens in a trance-like state. As you might expect, Flynn's contemporary influences are sufficiently esoteric, from -__-___'s The Heart Pumps Kool Aid to Dylan Henner's The invention of the Human (a concept album about an AI learning to sing). But he has also been inspired by his contemporaries from the traditional Irish music scene, many of whom contributed to the album, as well as those outside of that scene, such as noise rockers Gilla Band and Rising Damp.

Marlais is a Berlin-based singer, musician and producer whose musical output focuses on the traditional songs of the British Isles and Ireland. His work explores how to present them in a modern setting without neglecting tradition.

The result of his efforts is his third album Stream of Forms, released in 2022 in collaboration with Kinship and Treibender Teppich Records.