Dean: Lankum are the best ticket in town

Last month’s one-day In The Meadows event at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham (8 June) was a novelty in the busy outdoor summer gig calendar. Rarely is an Irish festival curated by its own headlining act, but that’s the kind of juice Lankum have on this island right now.

They’re a band that can be empowered to wield jurisdiction over not just their support acts, but three whole stages, two of which went dark when the headliners themselves finally appeared. Nobody’s attention was going to be distracted from the main pulpit.

It was 9.30pm. The sun was fading and the temperature suddenly dropped like a rollercoaster descending from its summit, as it tends to do during the Irish summer. In the chill, Lankum’s droning, gothic take on Irish folk music seemed to emanate both a mist and a mysticism.

They are a band at the peak of their powers. After so many recent wins, In The Meadows felt like a homecoming, celebration and victory lap for the lauded Dubliners. And as votes in the European and local elections were at that very moment stacked up in count centres all over the country, guitarist Daragh Lynch finished the set by telling the crowd to never vote for any “right-wing losers”, a most cathartic way to end a cursed election cycle.

And now, there’s new release Live in Dublin, not a quickly issued recording of the Kilmainham set, but an album drawn from three Vicar Street gigs that took place just over a year ago. Still, upon pressing play, and the opening notes of their moody, slow-moving version of “Wild Rover”, the mist I felt at Kilmainham seemed to settle in the room. You can feel it more intensely when Lankum reach the song’s apex and singer Radie Peat’s vocals make way for a powerful wall of sound constructed out of a guitar, fiddle, bayan and concertina. It eventually fades for applause from the audience – first notion that this is a live album.

“Well, Dublin,” responds Ian Lynch, brother of Daragh, to the crowd. “What’s the craic?”

If nothing else, Live in Dublin will go down as the home of Lankum’s version of “Rocky Road to Dublin”, a song they’ve been performing for a number of years now. Much like their reimagining of “Wild Rover”, it casts a familiar standard – a tune that’s perpetually being performed in Irish bars around the world – into something fresh, focused and exciting. Unlike most renditions, the lead vocals – shared by the entire band, including fourth member Cormac Mac Diarmada – don’t stomp, they drone on top of the low-end rumble of the band’s instruments, the jaunty melody still detectable in the darkness.

There is a rendition of “Go Dig My Grave”, Lankum’s signature tune that recently graced the Irish Independent’s 50 best Irish songs of all time list. This version is longer and more minimal musically than the studio recording, and the conspicuous absence of any noise from the enthralled crowd we know are there renders it even more eerie.

The whimsical flute riff in the middle of otherwise lurching textures on “Pride of Petravore” is like a beautiful flower in an otherwise scorched wasteland. What makes this version particularly interesting, though, is that it incorporates lyrics from “We Work the Black Seam”, Sting’s 1985 protest song for Britain’s striking coal miners, giving it a more political edge.

So, the band are on top form, and the recordings are crisp. There are, though, some problems with the presentation.

Strange is the decision to not include performances of “The New York Trader” and “Lord Abore and Mary Flynn”, two of Lankum’s better songs. Together, they formed a quarter of the band’s pre-encore setlist at Vicar Street. Could these cuts have been made with the vinyl release in mind? Live in Dublin has been released on a single LP when perhaps a double would have been more appropriate. It’s impossible to imagine that the album wouldn’t have been better in a more complete form.

Whatever the case, it presents a curious scenario: Because the two missing songs were lifted from the front half of the set, the band are heard telling the crowd they’ve one performance to go (pre-encore) after just five songs. And because both of those tracks were from last year’s critically revered False Lankum, it takes a significant amount of time to get to a song from the album the gigs were ostensibly scheduled to promote.

Live in Dublin serves as an exclamation mark on a magical few years for Lankum and fine companion piece to their studio records. It’s just a shame about those damn omissions, and the feeling that the album can only spark memories of seeing one of Ireland’s best live acts on stage, without allowing fans to fully relive the experience.