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Month: June 2024

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Reviews

Worlds Apart: Isolation on Inisherin

By Cara Crofts

“The next parish over is Boston,” the locals of the Aran Islands will proudly tell you. They are the edge of civilisation this side of ‘The Pond’ and like it that way. For the most part. Suspended off the west coast of Ireland, three limestone slabs are the foundations for life in a world outside of time; a far cry from Boston’s big city lights. American filmmaker Robert Flaherty was enchanted by the primitive lifestyle of the Aran Islands in 1934, fetishizing the fight between islanders and nature in his fictional documentary Man of Aran. The sea is strong but the community spirit is stronger – this romanticised portrayal doesn’t survive Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan. The play satirises the real-life filming of Man of Aran and Flaherty’s sentimentalised documentary, instead exposing the boredom and cruelty which breed in such a tight-knit community. “Cripple” Billy’s attempt to escape to Hollywood fails but, in The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh writes a way out for Siobhán (Kerry Condon) whose future teaching on the mainland frees her from her claustrophobic life. She urges her brother that on Inisherin there will be “nothing but more bleakness and grudges and loneliness and spite and the slow passing of time until death.” We can’t help hoping Pádraic (Colin Farrell) will join Siobhán but it is no surprise when he insists his life is on Inisherin. For him, nowhere but this secluded island could be home. 

A misshapen scrabble board of rocky fields. Calm waters stretch to the mainland. Folk music swells as the mist rises over McDonagh’s fictional island of Inisherin, inspired by the Aran Island of Inisheer. You could be forgiven for expecting a film of sunshine and rainbows as Colin Farrell strides through the port in this opening scene, framed by a saturated rainbow while he waves past the camera to fellow islanders. A cursory glance at the trailer is enough to realise that the blue skies and Irish green grasses are a backdrop for macabre confrontation and threats, but does not prepare us for the unrelenting isolation of life on Inisherin that pits friends Pádraic and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) against each other. 

“Be ready to cry,” my childhood friend warns as he recommends The Banshees of Inisherin to me over a pint of Guinness at O’Gorman’s pub in Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Having never seen this brawny, unsentimental hurling player near tears in twenty years I struggled to believe a film could have this impact. Moments before he had blindsided me with his belief in banshees; not a full acceptance of the traditional Celtic legend of a woman wailing to forewarn a family member’s death, but a sincere admission to avoiding the shortcut home along the bog road at night. “People say they’ve met banshees on the bog road which seems crazy, sure, but it’s hard not to believe it at least a little,” my invariably rational friend confesses. Pádraic dismisses the existence of banshees on Inisherin, but Colm is not convinced: “Maybe there are banshees, too. I just don’t think that they scream to portend death anymore. I think they just sit back, amused, and observe.” Mrs. McCormick, the film’s token banshee equivalent, fits Colm’s description as she predicts smilingly that two deaths will come to Inisherin. She is an overseer of the island’s tragedies, leading Garda Peadar Kearney to Dominic’s corpse in the lake and watching Pádraic wave goodbye to Siobhán at the cliff. Before the credits roll, Mrs. McCormick’s seated silhouette above the beach breaks the distance between Colm standing at the water’s edge and the retreating Pádraic. She sits back and observes the death of their friendship, but it is not her who haunts the island. Banshees are nothing to these men haunted by their own loneliness.

J.M. Synge, visiting the Aran Islands at the turn of the twentieth century, had “seen nothing so desolate” before. Such remoteness lends itself to sadness and, in The Aran Islands (1907), Synge recounts speaking with an old man who told him “how one of his children had been taken by the fairies” along with stories of assault and drowning on Inishmaan which inspired his Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. Although the Aran Islands of the 21st century have become a different place to where Synge stayed, visiting in 2019 felt like a journey back in time. The only other passenger to step off the Doolin Express at Inis Meáin (Inishmaan) was a caricature islander with wind-blown grey hair escaping the sides of a lightly salted beanie hat. Most backpackers and families stayed on the boat ready to flood the bigger Inis Mór in search of bike rentals, horse and carriages or ice-cream. Free from public transport and tourist attractions, the middle island is a place of the past. It is easy to imagine Inis Meáin’s one post office and shop functioning as the hub of village gossip – a modern version of Mrs. O’Riordan’s post office where she grills Pádraic for news and opens Siobhán’s letter. Several villagers were speaking in Gaelic when we came in, switching to English to ask us about our lives and travels before pointing us up the hill to ‘Café Baile’, a garden patio where a woman brought us homemade soup and soda bread from her kitchen. This taste of a simple life seemed desirable to us, soaking up May’s few rays of sun and looking back at the Cliffs of Moher while we refuelled. Not so easy in winter though, our host assured us. Or for her teenage children who get the boat to school on the mainland each day. The island has no bank, a primary school, a church, one pub – hardly more than Inisherin in 1923. Back in Co. Clare that evening, we had Cristy Moore’s ‘Lisdoonvarna’ cranked up high while driving through the song’s namesake town. 

“I like to hit Lisdoon,

In around Friday afternoon

…

Ramble in for a pint of stout 

And you’d never know who’d be hanging about!”

Nothing could be further from the darkened windows of the pub we’d just seen on Inis Meáin, or from Inisherin’s J.J. Devine Public House where it is always certain who will be ‘hanging about’. Jonjo’s shock to see Pádraic arrive at the pub without his drinking partner Colm marks the start of the rift between the friends who normally arrive together like clockwork at 2pm. Pádraic remains unable to accept Colm’s rejection: “It takes two to tango,” he whimpers. Dancing through life is no mean feat on Inisherin and McDonagh shows us that without a partner the dance becomes a dirge. 

Categories
Creative Writing

With Love, Frankie

By Matthew Dodd.

In a deckchair under the late afternoon sun, he sat lazily writing in a worn leather pocketbook. A pale blue linen shirt fit loosely over his torso, setting off the darker blue of his linen trousers. His deckchair stood a little off-centre on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, one of the finer hotels that overlooked the River Loire before its destruction by a German bomber, which was to prematurely eject its load en-route to Tours at the onset of the war. This would not happen for half a decade yet; he had no notion of staying that long.

In the pocketbook he was, with a fervent energy, composing passionate declarations of love to women he’d never met nor had any intention of meeting again. By this point in the afternoon (a large antique clock over the balcony entrance informed him, and twelve other patrons, that it was twenty-six minutes past four) he had completed one hundred and twenty-five such declarations in pieces that ranged from single sentences to polemics spanning a dozen pages. The object of this practice was unclear, but it evidently engaged the man deeply: his attention had hardly left the pocketbook since lunch, save short trips to the bar to order gin rickeys. By the bank of the river, a small child reached her hand out to feed a heron which had landed a metre or so into the water, only to tumble unceremoniously into the mud before her. Nearby, her parents did not seem to notice. They were, at that moment, preoccupied with the task of cutting a few slices of brie. 

The balustrades that enclosed the balcony were ornate with various vaguely Grecian images – an all but unrecognisable figure of Perseus that was recovered from La Porte’s wreck now takes pride-of-place in a local museum – and were spaced evenly as to allow guests an ample view of the river below. A single hollow chime announced the arrival of the half hour. At this, he set the pocketbook down on the table by his deckchair and got up, setting off once more on his familiar pilgrimage to the bar. The book, whose once black covers had grown brown by continued exposure to sunlight, displayed two open pages of an impassioned message to one Miss Delilah June. It was not one of the stronger pieces in the book but nevertheless exhibited the finely tempered prose on which he prided himself. At the end of the address he had written in a delicate hand: ‘With my love, which clings to you like climbing hydrangea, Frankie Oregon.’ 

Oregon wasn’t really his name. It was only the first name that his grandfather’s father had seen when he poked his head out from the boat on which he had stolen a trip out of Manila. And so it became his name. When it came time for him to pass his name on to a son – who would in turn pass it onto another son, who would then pass it onto Frankie – the suggestion of a family name preceding Oregon had evaporated. That life in Manila, and whatever name it was attached to, had been lost. Great-Grandfather Oregon was a man of few words and had never felt his own history to be worth wasting them on, so the memory of his life had died with him. By the time that Frankie Oregon was sat on the balcony of La Porte Ouverte, working on his second gin rickey, he had no family in either Manila or Oregon as far as he knew. The few relatives that he was aware of were scattered randomly about the world, on ranches or living in sensible two-bedroomed apartments. The River Oregon had no clear mouth and Frankie hardly cared to seek one out. As far as he was concerned, all that he owed to his ancestors was the odd flower on a gravestone, if he should happen to pass it by. Beyond that, he was content to be a singular, floating person. He had drifted all over the world in this way. Europe, Africa, Asia – oceans to oceans and coasts to coasts. He had briefly stopped in both Manila and Oregon but had felt very little in either. Indeed, very few places elicited a response from him merely by the fact of his being in them. Of course, he remembered the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal and, of course, he could itemise and expound their many intricacies and resonances – he had taken courses in both history and architecture – but, excluding those, the places meant practically nothing to him. For him, there was nothing in between the lines.

While Frankie was sitting on the balcony, head poised immovably above the pocketbook, a telegram arrived at the hotel’s front desk addressed to him. It was an invitation to the wedding of his sister, Evelyn, in Syracuse. Frankie would not read this message and the paper on which it was printed would one day join the unrecognisably charred rubble that had once been this fine hotel. The concierge who was on duty at the time of the  arrival of this telegram had, most peculiarly, just received one himself. In it, he learnt that his uncle had passed away from pneumonia at his home in Nantes just last weekend. As such, the concierge, whose name was Antoine (although everyone called him Tony), abandoned his post for the first time in his decade at La Porte Ouverte and ran off in the direction of a nearby bus station.

Outside, Frankie was nearly finished with his gin rickey. The next morning, he would check out of La Porte Ouverte and take a car to Orleans where he would likely find yet another hotel, or perhaps a café, and another deckchair to sit in. For now, though, he persisted in his scribblings. Behind him, in the hotel’s quite extravagant dining hall, tonight’s dinner service was being prepared. A bearded and bespectacled old man in a gravy-stained apron was yelling directions at a fleet of young chefs who, as a rule, wore far tidier uniforms than their superior. This evening, they would be serving a Chicken Fricassee, a dish La Porte’s kitchen was renowned for, with a crab bisque for its starter. In a few hours, Frankie Oregon would take the staff up on both these dishes, as well as a Crème Brulée which he would take once more on the balcony. By all accounts, he would enjoy them. After dinner he would drink a glass of neat scotch in his room and be in bed by eleven; he might even dream. 

As the clock’s larger hand moved towards the Roman numeral V, Frankie noticed something. His pocketbook was full. By a stroke of sheer coincidence, Frankie found that upon completing a plea of gentle longing to an unattached book clerk in Somerset, he had reached the book’s exact end. There were now precisely one hundred and thirty-two full messages in the book. Without exception, they were signed by the author, although the specific nature of his closing remarks differed throughout. The final words of his last message, and by extension the whole book, were uncomplicated: ‘with love, Frankie’. If he’d known these were to be his final words, perhaps he would’ve thought of something more exciting, but he hadn’t, so he didn’t. 

Upon finishing, he closed the book and placed it in his left trouser pocket. From his right, he produced a silver cigarette case out of which he drew one white cigarette. He raised it to his lips and, with a gold lighter he’d picked up somewhere in Warsaw, lit it. After taking two drags he began to walk towards the edge of the balcony. A gentle wind blew through a poplar tree across the river. Frankie gripped the banister with one hand and gazed down at the Loire as it passed below him. With the other he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it off of the balcony, aiming vaguely for a small outcrop of thrushes on the riverbank. After a few moments he reached into his left pocket and took out the pocketbook. For a matter of seconds he observed the book, turning it over once, then twice, in his hands before casting it deliberately over the banister. It spun wildly in an arc through the air, its covers splayed to give the impression of a bird fruitlessly attempting to take flight. After a journey of some seconds it landed noiselessly in the river and was borne immediately by the current downstream, where it soon passed a small girl feeding some cheese to a heron, before disappearing ultimately and irretrievably into the dark recesses of the water.

Categories
Reviews

Album in Review: ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ by Billie Eilish 

Candid, experimental and lucidly conceived, Hit Me Hard and Soft welcomes in a new era of Billie – a young artist in touch with her roots, but ever more willing to venture into new musical terrain.

By David Bayne-Jardine

Modern music consumption is becoming more and more short-lived. It is often the case that a few lines from a song go viral, soundtracking a new trend, only for the rest of the song, album, or artist’s work to remain relatively untapped. This is why Billie Eilish refused to release a single from her third studio album in advance. Hit Me Hard and Soft (2024) is designed to be listened to in one sitting; confident yet vulnerable, it calls for a return to the lost practice of album listening. Resisting staying in any place for too long, it is a stylistic rollercoaster that weaves between genres mid-song, and blurs the boundary between a track’s start and end. At times ecstatic and at others mellow, HMHAS marks a return to her roots in urban emo pop, but breaks into new musical territory in method and topic alike.

Eilish’s music has always drawn us close, both emotionally and physically. Launched into international fame at just 17 with her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, addressing personal and taboo subjects with a rawness and realism has come to characterise her music. Physically, her breathy vocals create a distinctly personal relationship with the listener, and in the first track of HMHAS we are greeted once again with music that is questioning and open. A sequel song to her Grammy-winning ‘What Was I Made For?’, in ‘Skinny’ Eilish reflects on her life in the spotlight, as she struggles to grasp just who she is in a world adamant to define her by her recent weight-loss or queer sexuality. An enchanting, stripped-down guitar and bass line, topped off with light and vulnerable vocals is followed by the crooning, cinematic strings of the outro – a new experimental feature in Eilish and her brother FINNEAS’s music production. 

But in the first about-turn of the album, as the tenderness of ‘Skinny’ ends, so begins the driving, grungy sound of ‘Lunch’ – a track that gloriously celebrates her newly-discovered queer attraction in the heavy electronic style of her earliest music. Eilish’s coming out was not without some commotion, as the artist famously called out Variety for caring too much about her sexuality and not enough about her art. Her admittance that she’s ‘attracted to them [women] for real’ became the focus of many magazine articles, including that of Variety, despite having expressed her frustration at the media’s obsession with her sexuality numerous times before. In this song, for the first time, Eilish addresses her attraction to women confidently and openly. Her breath, sensitive and emotional in the album’s first track, becomes sultry and passionate in this song, combining seamlessly with sections of spoken word. 

So it seems that contrast lies at the heart of HMHAS, from the impossibility of the title’s demand to the quick-shifting genre changes that define the album. Light/dark play runs through ‘Birds of a Feather’, with its bouncy indie pop but morbidly obsessive lyrics. Safely describable as the most palatable song of the album, this fourth track is a head-bopping, smile-inducing, coming-of-age love song (it’s no surprise it features in the new season trailer for Netflix’s hit teen romance Heartstopper). Yet, in true Eilish style, the lyrics overlying the playful backing track speak in a darker tone – ‘I want you to stay/’Til I rot away, dead and buried/’Til I’m in the casket you carry’. Airy, light vocals transform into an impressive belting range in the later choruses – a technique with which she had experimented in her second album, Happier Than Ever, and with which she engages full-throttle in this, her third. In ‘The Greatest’, for example, the ascending vocal line climaxes into an immense belt of frustration and anger, before falling into an unexpected but powerful modulation. Eilish riffs in her upper range as the instrumental line marks out a more unconventional and experimental rhythm, where each bar of 8/8 is beat in groups of 3, 3, and 2. This head-bopping, heavy rock feel, aptly shows off the mastery of Eilish and FINNEAS’s writing and production.

It’s no coincidence that HMHAS seems much closer to the emo-rock style of her first album than that of her second. In her Rolling Stone Cover Story, Eilish expresses her desire to return to her electronic roots in HMHAS, describing her previous album’s more acoustic feel as a product of Covid and its restrictions – a time when she felt more out of touch with who she was. In HMHAS, Eilish revisits the topics and features of her first album, but this time with a sound that is more refined, mature and experienced. ‘Chihiro’ is like a more grown-up version of ‘bellyache’ with its punchy, sub-terranean bassline. ‘The Diner’ emulates earlier tracks like ‘Therefore I am’ with its immensely heavy downbeat. ‘Bad Guy’ is somewhat reborn in the bass-driven nature of ‘Lunch’. Whilst Happier Than Ever was refreshing because of its experimentation with a lighter, more instrumental feel, in HMHAS Billie turns back to the urban, technological music that first brought her to fame. 

And techno is what we get in ‘L’amour de ma Vie’ – the sixth and perhaps best track of her new album. The song opens with a rich, jazz-infused ballad sound, but is soon cut short in a mid-song transition that flings us into the incandescent, electronic world of the 1980s. A four-on-the-floor beat morphs into a driving techno line, accompanied by reverberating synth descants and heavily-processed vocals that tell of her liberation post-break-up. The juxtaposition characterising this song is as exhilarating as it is unorthodox, and occurs several times across the shapeshifting album. For example, reversely, in ‘Bittersuite’, synthy techno transforms into a lighter waltz, before moving seamlessly back into grungy electropop. A third transition occurs between the end of this song and the start of the final one, ‘Blue’, in which the oscillating synth line of ‘Bittersuite’ is reborn into a vocal melody. ‘Blue’ is very much a conclusion to the entire album, with the orchestral lines from the opening track returning to accompany Eilish, who reflects on the experience of her turbulent relationship. Another mid-song shift in style occurs for a final time, as Eilish admits the sympathy she has for her ex-lover, who, despite hurting her, has had their own struggles too. 

These elegant transitions across, and within, songs are testimony to the importance of listening to Hit Me Hard and Soft in its entirety, in order. In an era where music consumption is becoming increasingly momentary, where songs are TikTok-ified into short soundbites that come to define an artist’s work, HMHAS resists conforming to traditional album structures – it is very much a musical experience. 

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An annual festivity held in summer by the members of a printing establishment.
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