When It Hits You Feel No Pain

Just how far do you think you can push it tonight? Choose your poison, your company, your floor space and let human nature take its course to wherever… And no matter how high or low you’ve managed to take yourself or anyone else, on the available evidence Oisin Lunny has beaten you there already. When It Hits is about lost weekends, abandonment to the dual pursuit of oblivion and stunningly great music, and about the heart of darkness that beats at the core of every epic all-nighter.

Leading off with ‘I Close My Eyes’, a rapturous collaboration with US soul legend Linda Clifford, Lunny lays his Northern Soul credentials on the table from the get-go. ‘The Mood Club’ taps the same celebratory vein, perfect for those high-kickin’, earsplittin’-grinnin’ moments on a sweat-soaked dancefloor.

But it’s not long before things start to get a little nasty, and When It Hits becomes so much more than 2001 Northern Soul with a mouldy Guinness head. Cue scuzzily brilliant piss-artist scribe Bennan Murphy. Early single ‘Home Movie’ is a desperately drunken bruiser, spiralling jackhammer beats the backdrop to Murphy’s tales of screaming foul-mouthed Dublin violence, stumbling to a blood-spattered conclusion in the lines “I am waiting, I am fucking watching the road for number 30 Hatch Street/There I see a half-full, half-bottle of whisky/Now I shall find sleep…”

‘54 Static’ is the damp bedsit brother to Massive Attack’s ‘Risingson’, and effortlessly matches the Bristol crew for sheer claustrophibic melancholia, while ‘Hey Mr. (Tambourine Man)’ goes on a mad one next door, a superbly evil techno monster that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Aronofsky soundtrack. ‘Credo’ bookends the album in suitably reflective form, Bennan nursing a hangover the size of Dublin and pondering whether history is leading us towards redemption or down a progressively darker alleyway.

When It Hits You Feel No Pain is a breathlessly

ambitious and inventive work, holding its hands in the air with a cruelly heavy heart. “Please let me forget about today/Until tomorrow...”