Radie Peat: No Human Tongue Can Tell review – Lankum singer’s solo debut is the year’s best folk album

(Rough Trade)Collecting traditional songs of female struggle and strength, the Irish singer invests them with staggering power

Lankum singer Radie Peat’s extraordinary debut album begins without frills or ornament: just her voice, stark and low, each breath like air vibrating through the metal reeds of a harmonium. Singing Hares on the Mountain to the tune Shirley Collins arranged for 1964’s Folk Roots, New Routes, Peat accompanies herself subtly on Fender Rhodes piano before adding layers of Mellotron and Wurlitzer. Her simple, quiet approach is consistently startling and profoundly moving.

No Human Tongue Can Tell collects songs of female struggle, suffering, strength and endurance, although Peat only realised this, she writes in her liner notes, after limiting her choices by her “own mind and abilities” and “personal preferences”. Epic statements clearly aren’t her bag; her gut-deep connection with songs she’s sung live for years clearly matters more, with many delivered in new versions, pulsing with urgency.

Willow Garden, performed in a major-key chorus by Lankum in 2017, becomes a reverb-heavy, haunting elegy, with Peat’s handling of the lyric “poor little girl” buckling with sadness. She paints the woman “hanging out the wash” vividly against rolling guitar arpeggios in Same Old Man, and summons oceans of yearning in the frightening Still I Love Him, a song found by fellow contemporary Irish singer John Francis Flynn, in which a woman savagely beaten by her husband remains emotionally bound to him.

Just as arresting is Peat’s take on Dark Horse on the Wind, Liam Weldon’s 1966 lament for the lost dream of the Irish republic, written on the brink of the Troubles. “Now the warriors spring from the earth / To maim and kill their own,” Peat sings against a solid drone. John “Spud” Murphy’s production brilliantly brings out earthy, granular details, from the sucking-in of air through Peat’s concertina bellows on Cailín Deas to the disruptive thwack of Eleanor Myler’s drums. How staggering for traditional songs to taste so like fresh blood: stunning, brutal and unforgettable.

Arriving alongside a self-penned anthology, Bróna McVittie’s Supernatural (Company of Corkbots) is an ambitious collection of fairy songs for Samhain, with a prevailing sound that feels like a soft-folk successor to William Orbit’s work for Madonna during the Frozen era. Lithuanian singer Jausmė, Ukrainian bandura player Anastasiya Voytyuk and Spanish flamenco guitarist Antonia Jiménez also make gorgeous contributions. Bird in the Belly’s Only Dogs As Friends (GF*M) is another solid set of strange folk from Laura Ward and Ben Webb, lit up by warm, radio-friendly arrangements. Highlights include the rousing Go Along Bobby and the shivery Lambs. South African guitarist Guy Buttery’s Improvisations from a Rural Church: Volume 1 brings the swarmandal (an Indian zither) and the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) into a succession of ambient folk explorations around a pump organ in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Listen out for bats, birds, rats, passing tractors and stormy weather adding tension and texture.