Milkweed has today released their new video for the track titled ‘The Pangs of Ulster’ from their upcoming album ‘Remscéla’, due May 2nd via Broadside Hacks Recordings.
More of an audio experience and experimentation in sound, this is a song that takes atmospheric feeling to a level most artists fear to tread. Essential Irish transitions into a global music scene, Milkweed immerses itself in heritage and homage with the vibe of true artists and the capacity of compatriot poets.
Beautifully crafted and sincerely executed, ‘The Pangs of Ulster’ represents but one chapter of ‘Remscéla’ while giving a world-shaping and ear-opening glimpse of the possibilities of music.
About ‘Remscéla’
Following a Times-celebrated performance at SXSW earlier this month, a sold-out performance at Dalston’s legendary Cafe Oto with a full 10-piece band, and a live improvisation on BBC Radio 3’s The Late Junction in February, the forthcoming album anticipates a string of tour dates for 2025, and follows up widespread acclaim from The Quietus, The Guardian, Bandcamp Daily, Tradfolk, KLOF, Raven Sings The Blues, Rough Trade and So Young.
The album itself takes direct inspiration from Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Irish Epic of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Tasking themselves with processing all 400 pages, but becoming humbled after it took a year to process 20, they only got as far as the Remscéla of their new record’s title – a collection of independently transmitted ‘pre-stories’ that provides the necessary context to what is to follow. Take The Pangs Of Ulster for example – a curse that incapacitated the men of Ulster with the same pain felt by women in labor, something that proves pivotal to the story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge but is unexplained in the text itself.
About Milkweed
For three years Milkweed has refined a formula, taking existing source material (a folklore journal, a book on Welsh myths, another on bronze age human remains), cutting up the words, and feeding them through a woodchipper of lo-fi production and experimental folk music.
This time, however, they decided to push themselves further – to use all 400 pages of Thomas Kinsella’s masterful translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, rather than manipulated snippets. After it took an entire year just to process 20 pages, however, the band found themselves humbled. “It made us appreciate oral traditions in a completely different way, the intensity with which you had to engage with the work to feel like you could understand and transmit it.”
With Milkweed having applied energy befitting a 400-page epic to just the fragments of the Remscéla, the record bristles with more lifeforce than anything the band has yet produced. The band has raised the bar when it comes to their production, the blend of manipulated vocals, eerie beats, and instrumental scraps twisting around each other like a cloud of thick, potent smoke. It makes for a crucial step forward in Milkweed’s exquisite discography, and yet to view Remscéla in such earthly terms is to do it a disservice. Rather, this is an album that places the band firmly in the lineage of storytellers through whom these epics have become immortal, channeled from one century to the next and for centuries hereafter. “What we came to appreciate is that our role is just to be a vessel. You sacrifice your inner life to do it, but you’ve fulfilled your function.”
‘Remscéla’ Tracklist
- How the Táin Bó Cuailnge was Found Again
- How Conchobor was Begotten
- 3.Téte Brec, the Twinkling Hoard
- The Pangs of Ulster
- Drinking In The House of Fedlimid
- Imbas Foresnai, The Light of Foresight
- Whiter Than The Snow is the White Treasure of Her Teeth
- The Milk-Fed Calf
- Exile of the Sons of Uisliu
- Noisiu’s Voice a Wave Roar, a Sweet Sound to Hear Forever
Featured image by Poppy Waring.
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