Years ago, Sinéad O’Connor set out her thoughts about the song ‘Jackie’, her great lamentation for a soul lost at sea. She sang it like she was a ghost, wailing and disbelieving that her man was so long gone. Sinéad told me she had based the song on an Irish play – she couldn’t remember the title – that had ended with a drowned fisherman and a woman who cried into the darkness with the sound of the pre-Christian caoin.
My guess is that the play was Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge, themed around the perilous Atlantic life of Inis Meáin. At the end, mother Maurya watches as the body of her last son, Bartley is brought into the house. It is time for a simple stage direction:
“She pauses and the keen rises a little more loudly from the women, then sinks away.”
RÓIS by Stuart Bailie
RÓIS understands the ritual power of the caoin. Her brilliant new release, Mo Léan is an immersion in the many varieties of woe. Sometimes she is monumental and wired into the tradition. There’s an amusing, craggy interlude called ‘The Death Notices’, that makes light of a nation that enjoys the naming of the deceased.
Importantly, RÓIS alternates her folk strains with moments of liberating, avant-noise. She opens the record with ‘What Do You Say’, a great cosmic utterance that sails high with the likes of Tim Buckley, Elizabeth Fraser and FKA Twigs.
Three times during this mini album, the Angelus bell tolls. Perhaps it’s a call to devotion, but the responses are less orthodox. ‘Cití’ owes something to the sean nós style and the legacy of Donegal’s Cití Ní Ghallchóir, but it takes a few alternative paths on the ascent and it amazes, often.
‘Oh Lovely Appearance of Death’ is taken from an ancient Charles Wesley hymnal, a bid from the Methodist believer to confront mortality and prepare for a fine exit. RÓIS is from Fermanagh, intimate with the folk vernacular and she gives Wesley’s sentiments an eerie endorsement.
Like her fellow travellers in Huartan, she uses the Irish language, pagan histories and a dark veil to bring the culture to a new, pertinent place. Here is the proof of it. The astonishing vocals of ‘Caoine’ and a portal to the other. And the closing declaration of ‘I Feel Love’, a neo-primitive banger that surges like a trance anthem with a bean sídhe chorus. So good.
Stuart Bailie
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