One Leg One Eye at The White Hotel
Johnny James, Managing EditorBook now
One Leg One Eye
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Another gig preview, another brilliant Lankum offshoot – and another reminder of what we’re losing with The White Hotel.
Dublin’s current scene seems unusually fertile generally, but within that, the Lankum orbit is remarkable. ØXN, Poor Creature, One Leg One Eye – each founded by one Lankum member or another – move through the same deep soil in different and decidedly strange directions. Is this just an endlessly creative set of musicians? The bottomlessness of the Irish tradition? The Irish government’s actual support for working artists? Whatever the answer, the result is a cluster of projects that make tradition feel less like inheritance than active material – to be broken open and made strange again.
One Leg One Eye moves furthest from the familiar. Ian Lynch and noise veteran George Brennan route Irish mythology through black metal-flavoured drone – past folk, past song structure, into territory where the music doesn’t reference myth so much as enact it. It is also, it should be said, genuinely frightening.
Their second album CRONE, released in May this year on AD 93, draws from the Ulster Cycle – specifically from the sovereignty goddess in her most severe form: the crone, the war prophet, the shapeshifter. Actor and director Olwen Fouéré, channelling the Morrigan – Ireland’s crow-haunting war goddess – delivers vocal incantations improvised over assembled drones: industrial noise, low-end rumble, hurdy gurdy moans and field recordings that move slowly enough to feel geological.
Much of the material predates the project itself, recorded while Lynch was still finishing the debut – which perhaps explains why CRONE feels less like a follow-up than a parallel thought, pulling in a darker direction. Where …And Take The Black Worm With Me retained some anchor in traditional song, CRONE cuts that loose, leaving only ritual.
One Leg One Eye are mid-way through their first UK headline tour, following a run supporting Godspeed You! Black Emperor, making this among the first chances to hear CRONE live. Interestingly, the band play The White Hotel two days before the summer solstice – the moment, in the old Celtic calendar, when the boundary between worlds was at its thinnest. For an album haunted by the Morrigan and the sovereignty goddess, the timing feels less of a coincidence than it sounds.
It’s also only been days since The White Hotel announced it will close in January 2027 – the site eaten by regeneration, destined to become… a wetland park. For a decade, this place has been a sanctuary for Greater Manchester’s misfits and a crucible for its artists, championing artistic freedom over profit at every turn. Every show – and yes, probably every preview of ours – will carry some of that emotional weight, now. Especially ones like this: strange, dark, ugly, beautiful and wildly off the beaten track. Exactly like the venue itself.
