Album Review: Poor Creature, All Smiles Tonight

Every so often, there’s that stretch of disbelief when you first hear a phenomenal album. Like, come on – how can each line and track be arranged so immaculately? How can music feel so effortless, so natural, when it is clearly borne of great effort?

Such is the magnificence of the debut album All Smiles Tonight from Poor Creature, the Lankum-Landless offshoot comprising Ruth Clinton, Cormac MacDiarmada and John Dermody. Set in the context of Irish folk music, the album cuts wider to make way for trip hop and psychedelic textures.

It’s easy to be swept up by the sublime beauty of a Poor Creature song: Clinton and MacDiarmada’s crystalline vocals are arresting, exuding a quiet patience that seems to lower the volume of everything around it. They’re ostensibly a folk trio, but the transfixing nature of their work feels more like sorcery, as if they were weaving spells from each filigreed guitar figure and porcelain syllable.

The sonic backdrops are as vibrant as any other kind of storytelling: wormholes of raves long past; pummelling trance – and then a dream-like lightness, guitars and synthetic swirls. All Smiles Tonight explodes in Technicolor from the first melty drum and drone flourish on ‘Adieu Lovely Eireann’, a Cocteau Twins-style lament about leaving the homeland, where the dark shadow of the housing crisis looms in the margins.

Then comes ‘Bury Me Not’, an utterly astounding confluence of strings and wires. Ray Lynam and Philomena Begley’s song ‘The Whole Town Knows’ sees Poor Creature tap into a pure electric current of gated reverb percussion and lilting harmonies, while the organ swells of ‘Hick’s Farewell’ beget a sense of doom and gloom beneath the evocative sonics.

Proceedings draw to an ecstasy-inducing close with ‘Willie O’, which slices through the album’s rhythmic fluster and creates an illusion of endless ascension.

I’d put it in the running for album of the year — but which of the five-or-so thousand years to file it under? Poor Creature’s music belongs to all time, and 2025 is quite the lucky year for having it.

9.5/10

Out now