A Guardian review of a Lankum singer’s solo debut suggests that traditional songs about women’s struggle hit hardest when sung plainly over spare keyboards, with the voice carrying the song and nothing added to dress it up.
Key takeaways
- The Guardian has described a new Rough Trade album of traditional songs about female struggle and strength as the year’s best folk album.
- The review credits the album’s power to restraint: a low, unadorned voice backed by electric keyboards added in gradual layers.
- Arranging a traditional song is an act of interpretation, and folk singers have treated it that way since at least the 1960s revival.
- A single review cannot settle whether restraint is the best way to present these songs, and the case is still open.
Restraint, not reinvention, is the source of the power
Folk singers who take on traditional material face a recurring choice. They can rebuild old songs with heavy production, new structures and modern sounds, or they can strip them down and trust that the words and melody will carry. This article argues that the second approach, when done well, often serves songs about women’s suffering and endurance better than the first.
The trigger for that argument is a Guardian review published at the end of October. It covers No Human Tongue Can Tell, the debut solo album by Radie Peat, a singer with the Irish group Lankum, released on Rough Trade. The Guardian reports that the record gathers traditional songs about female struggle, suffering, strength and endurance. Its reviewer calls it the year’s best folk album and puts much of its effect down to how quiet and simple the delivery is.
This article does not try to judge the album, which it has not assessed independently, or to make claims about the performer beyond what the review reports. It uses the review as a case study for a broader idea: in this repertoire, holding back can be a stronger interpretive choice than adding more. Plenty of good recordings have taken the opposite route, so restraint is not the only valid approach. The narrower claim is that songs which already describe hardship directly gain from arrangements that leave room for the text.
The case rests on three kinds of evidence. The first is what the review says about how the album works. The second is the long folk revival habit of treating arrangement as interpretation. The third is the nature of the songs themselves.
The review ties the album’s impact to its plainness
The most direct evidence is the review’s own account of the opening track. The Guardian describes the album as starting with no frills: the singer’s voice, low and stark, with breathing that the reviewer compares to air moving through the metal reeds of a harmonium. That opening song is “Hares on the Mountain”. The review says it is sung to the tune Shirley Collins arranged for the 1964 album Folk Roots, New Routes.
According to the review, the singer accompanies herself lightly on Fender Rhodes electric piano at first, then adds layers of Mellotron and Wurlitzer. The reviewer calls this simple, quiet approach consistently startling and deeply moving.
What matters is the cause the reviewer points to. The praise is not for a clever reworking, an unexpected genre blend or a big production idea. It is for the voice being left largely exposed, with keyboards coming in slowly rather than all at once. The order of events reinforces the point: the voice comes first, alone, and the instruments follow as support rather than as the main attraction.
The instruments are worth a note. The Fender Rhodes and the Wurlitzer are electric pianos with a soft, rounded tone. The Mellotron is a keyboard that plays back recorded tape, and it is linked with hazy, slightly unstable textures. None of them belongs to the acoustic kit usually associated with traditional song. As the review describes it, though, they are used to frame the voice rather than to compete with it. Restraint here does not mean using only traditional instruments. It means deciding how much to add and when.
The folk revival has long treated arrangement as interpretation
The second piece of evidence comes from folk music history, and the review itself points to it. By setting “Hares on the Mountain” to a tune arranged for Folk Roots, New Routes, the new album links itself to a recording made during the British folk revival of the 1960s.
That link matters because it shows that the question of how to arrange a traditional song is not new. Songs passed down orally rarely have one fixed form. Words change between singers and regions, and melodies get swapped, borrowed and adapted. A singer who records such a song is always choosing which text, which tune and which setting to use. The 1964 album is widely remembered as an early example of a revival singer pairing traditional English material with an unusual accompaniment. In that sense the choice of setting was itself the statement.
A new recording that uses an arrangement from that album joins a conversation that is now several decades old. It recognises that earlier performers shaped how the song is heard today, and it adds a new layer through its own choices of voice and keyboard. This supports the main argument in a particular way. If arrangement is interpretation, then an arrangement that draws attention to the singer’s breath and phrasing is a deliberate way of reading the song. It is not a lack of ambition.
Treating restraint as a conscious choice also answers a common objection to sparse recordings, which is that they are simply under-produced. Within the folk tradition, deciding what to leave out has always been part of the craft.
The songs already carry their own weight
The third piece of evidence is the material. The Guardian reports that the album collects songs about female struggle, suffering, strength and endurance. The review summary does not give the full track list, and this article does not guess at which other songs are included.
The general point holds without that detail. Traditional ballads and lyric songs are one of the main places where ordinary people’s experiences were recorded and passed on, including women’s experiences of courtship, betrayal, loss, labour and survival. These songs often tell their stories plainly. Hardship is described directly, sometimes in very few words, and much of the emotional effect comes from that directness.
When a song already states its subject this bluntly, a dense arrangement can work against it. Busy instrumentation, dramatic dynamics or heavy effects can pull attention away from the narrative, or can tell the listener how to feel at moments the text leaves open. A plain vocal leaves the listener alone with the story. The Guardian’s description of the delivery as startling and moving fits that reading: the force the reviewer hears appears to come mainly from the songs and the voice, not from anything layered on top.
Gathering songs around a shared theme adds to this. Heard one after another, songs about female struggle and endurance can build a cumulative weight that no single song carries alone. A consistent, restrained sound across the record could help that accumulation by keeping the focus on the stories rather than on stylistic changes from track to track. The review summary does not say whether the album keeps that consistency all the way through.
The strongest case against
The argument has real weaknesses, and they deserve a fair hearing.
First, all of the evidence about this album comes from one review. “Year’s best folk album” is a critic’s judgement, and other critics may hear the same record differently. A response that one writer finds deeply moving may strike another as monotonous or under-arranged. One favourable review shows that a restrained approach can work. It does not show that restraint is generally better.
Second, the album is not actually minimal. According to the review, it uses three different electric keyboards in layers. Calling that restraint may say more about how it is played than about how much is on the recording. Someone looking for proof that unaccompanied or near-unaccompanied singing serves these songs best would not find it here.
Third, there is a well-established and highly regarded tradition of reworking folk material boldly. Lankum, the group this singer comes from, is known for reshaping traditional songs rather than simply preserving them, and full-band, electric and experimental versions of old ballads have reached listeners that plain performances may not. A strong counter-argument says these songs have lasted precisely because each generation has felt free to change them, sometimes drastically. On that view restraint is one option among many and has no special claim to authenticity.
Fourth, quiet, intimate recordings of old songs could be a matter of current taste rather than a lasting truth about the material. If audiences are especially receptive to that sound right now, the praise may reflect the present moment more than anything about how these songs should be presented.
Finally, the review was published with two months of the year still to go. Any “best of the year” claim made at that point is provisional.
Evidence that would change the conclusion
Several developments could strengthen or weaken the argument.
If other critics and year-end folk polls broadly agreed with the Guardian, the case that this restrained approach has landed with listeners would be stronger. If reviews were mixed, especially if they criticised the album as too sparse or too uniform, the case would be weaker.
Comparisons would also help. Recordings of the same songs in heavier arrangements, whether by this singer, by Lankum or by other performers, would let listeners judge whether the plainer settings actually communicate the material better or simply differently.
Live performance is another test. If the restrained style holds an audience in concert as well as on record, that would suggest it reflects something about the songs and not only studio choices.
More detail about the album would also clarify things. A full track list, notes on which versions and sources were used, and an account of how the arrangements were built up would make it possible to judge how deliberate and consistent the approach is. At present, beyond what the Guardian reports, those details are not known.
For now, the evidence available points in one direction without settling the question. In this one case, by one critic’s account, holding back made traditional songs of women’s struggle more powerful.
Sources and further reading
- The Guardian, music section: review of the album, the main source for all details about the record
- Rough Trade: the record label, for official release information
- English Folk Dance and Song Society, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: archive resources on traditional song versions and their transmission
- Histories of the British and Irish folk revivals: background on how 1960s recordings shaped later interpretations of traditional material
Surfaced from the rss:guardian_music signal “acclaimed folk debut album”. AI-assisted draft, editorially reviewed.
