Lankum/Cameron Picton @ The Belasco, 2/28/2025 (#14)
You're alright, LA
Video by EM JAY VEE
"Don't listen to what they say about you, LA," Lankum's Daragh Lynch said, "you're alright." Are we? For that night, I guess we were. At the very least, Lankum's doom folk had a palliative effect on a crowd already exhausted by the prospect of the next black cloud hovering on the horizon. That's the thing about Lankum: it's like a bad times vortex, sucking up your bad times in order to increase the impact of its songs. It's a strange feeling. You feel great hearing about the misfortunes of bygone people on the brink of disaster. That's the blues and folk traditions in a nutshell, I guess — country music, too. But it's rare to feel it so acutely, to feel like you’ve been transported into the story yourself and Lankum is helping to shoulder the burden. Bad times to bring on good times, the darkness before the light.
First, though, before we lifted that burden, we got Black Midi’s Cameron Picton, a singer/songwriter blessed with some excellent guitar chops. I can't say Picton's non-instrumental work did much for me: its scattershot structure reminded me of Tim Buckley, which is a musician I've yet to get. But Picton's acoustic guitar shredding, an Al Stewart-esque acuity, shined. There was an outstanding track where Picton layered looped strumming on top of each other, recalling the work of Rhys Chatham. And Picton also tackled a Bert Jansch composition, which is a ballsy thing to do at any time, lest when you're opening for, as Picton put it, "the best folk band on the planet." That said, that kind of good-spirited mood eventually won me over. Picton was self-effacing in a charming way, always ready with a well-timed quip.
Well-timed goes double for Lankum. The quintet, the OG four plus a drummer, were tight but in that folk way where there's a pleasing looseness in the belt area that kept things from getting too stuffy. Take the band's opener, "The Wild Rover." Radie Peat's keening vocals cut through the strummy drone, that quintessential low thrum that sounds almost industrial in nature. But the four-part harmony — Peat, Daragh Lynch (guitar), Ian Lynch (uilleann pipes, concertina, tin whistle), and Cormac Mac Diarmada (fiddle, viola) — sounded so human, so lived in, like hearing the town elder spin a yarn that has entered itself into the location's lore.
That's Lankum's strength: storytelling, taking these traditionals, originals, and covers and turning them into these aurally evocative narratives that have the depth of a novel. The vocal-less end of "The Wild Rover," with Diarmada's sawing fiddle, the pounding percussion, and Peat's humming harmonium, is so rich with sonic details, giving the song's epilogue a tangible quality, almost like you’re turning the pages of a book. Hearing it on record is one thing. In person, it just swallows you up.
Catching Lankum in person also displays how affable the band is, offsetting the relative seriousness of its music. There were running jokes ("You can't suck an egg, BUT..."), world-weary insights (“It’s all about why it’s a bad idea to get in league with people who murder innocent people … It’s a simple humanitarian truth that even the illiterate peasants who wrote this song 300 years ago could fucking grasp”) and relatable admissions of mortality (Peat admitted to being out the other side of a brutal hangover; you couldn't tell, which is its own superpower). And it's kind of like, that's why we go to shows, to get the whole 360 degrees of the human experience. Lankum digs deep into your soul and pulls that experience out, taking all of the bad times with it. It's a hell of a story.
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