While it’s approaching passé at this point to draw links between Irish folk music and the noir-ish undercurrents that have informed some of its fringes, an album that swept me off my feet back in the heat-death of the blogosphere era has come to mind as of late amid talk of “doom-folk” and such in connection with Ireland’s living tradition.
Michael Owens was no stranger to Irish independent music by 2011, having served time in heavier, more angular outfits like Puget Sound and Terrordactyl before wielding an axe for stoners Realistic Train. But on Aliens, his first album recorded under the nickname Owensie and released under the watch of Limerick DIY guardians Out on a Limb Records, sonic excesses made way for a purposeful exploration of empathy, a rumination on humanity’s predicament, and meditation on the purpose inherent to our own insignificance.
The title track opens the record, a slowly crushing three minutes of feeling for the plight of refugees and immigrants, awash with new information and unprocessed trauma in a new land—sadly all-too prescient in the face of the current moment: “Aliens, though their form like yours or mine/ I heard their voices, I looked into their eyes.”
A similar tumbling phrasing carries “Subtle Connections,” its seeming lyrical earnestness now reading like a reminder of the wholesale depth of feeling of early adulthood, lost in the world, overawed by connections beyond the body: “All that we know is that we’ve been loved.”
But it’s in transcending the self and taking in a wider context that Owens’s state-of-the-world address contains some still-breathtaking moments. “Cruel Time” grasps well-worn euphemisms for the cycles of life and gently massages distinction back into them with a certain ease: “Hollow is the branch that falls to the wayside/ Its sway will slow and speed as the wind blows.”
Likewise, the album’s crest lies in closer “Tied to a Name,” a song inspired by the death of his great uncle in Ireland’s 1916 Rising, and the silence that shrouded his generation’s experience, eschewing blood-and-sacrifice tropes to imagine the absence of feeling that followed the heightened awareness of combat, all for a sovereignty that was in the process of being ceded at time of writing: “His torn flesh and broken bone, ‘neath the rubble and stone/ Never to breathe again, to kiss someone and feel love.”
One could make reference to European primitive guitar or various folk revivals as possible reference points, or to point to the lonely but lush cello that appears on said title track as a nod to wider aspirations, but equally, there’s a vulnerability, an exposure, whenever Owens pushes to the top of his vocal range, that serves to unmoor any complacency a listener might bring to the record.
Fragility is something we’re often coerced into fearing. The apprehension that one day, the tactile, the tangible, the knowable, will disappear, and in their place will be history and fact. Where Aliens succeeds, is to provide a gentle but sure reminder that that same fragility is at the heart of being alive, lending us its fleeting purpose, and stoking our fires, even when they’re down to glowering embers in the grate.