THERE IS, perhaps, a certain West of Ireland echo - or echoes, if you will - in the sleeve of Field Recordings, the new Loner Deluxe album, to that of the sleeve for Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother.
Both feature a farm animal, alone in a field, staring back at the viewer, and the covers of both hint at, and deliberately distract from, the contents within.
The bliss and majesty of Atom Heart Mother's bucolic, pastoral, folk-rock and prog served to mask its dark themes - mental breakdown, anxiety, failed romances, the failure to understand and connect with others, and nostalgia for days which can never return.
Similarly, Field Recordings, released on Friday March 5, via independent Galway label Rusted Rail, draws on a wide palette of sounds, perhaps the Loner's widest yet - lo-fi bedroom pop, garage rock, electronica, hip-hop, and more left field influences such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
What unites these seemingly incompatible genres is the intimate feel of the music, a happy balancing of rhythm and melody, and a sense of humour. Yet underneath, lie dark themes of technophobia, paranoia, conspiracy, nuclear fallout, vandalism, gentrification, environmental collapse, and of course the Covid-19 pandemic ('Viral Hit' ).
'Field Recordings celebrates the richness of Loner Deluxe's record collection, but also expresses its admiration for production, for sound, for the possibilities of the studio' - Cian Ó Cíobháin
Yet hope comes in the form of 'Meet On The Wedge', a nod to the 1968 Fairport Convention number, 'Meet On The Ledge'. The Loner's tune celebrates summer days meeting friends by the canal, near the bridge which links Upper and Lower Dominick Street - something we cannot do right now, but which we can look forward to doing post-pandemic.
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Field Recordings has already received high praise from An Taobh Tuathail's Cian Ó Cíobháin: "I absolutely love this album and make no mistake this is an album, not just a collection of tunes thrown together. The whole thing strikes me as making sense in the way it's sequenced: an LP that deserves to be savoured in the way the tracks have been programmed. Field Recordings celebrates the richness of Loner Deluxe's record collection, but also expresses its admiration for production, for sound, for the possibilities of the studio".
The music was created, assembled, and performed by Loner Deluxe (Keith Wallace ), Cecilia Danell (A Lilac Decline ) and Brian Kelly (So Cow ), and Dave Colohan, and mastered by Aaron Hurley. It is the follow-up to the Loner's 2017 cassette release, Songs I Taped Off the Radio.
Field Recordings is available as a CD and digitally via Rusted Rail and Rusted Rail Bandcamp.
