ONE LEG ONE EYE - Crone

A guttural chant, noises of uncertain origin, synthesizers that claw at the humus upon which cries muffled by fear of the unknown come to rest. "Crone" is the new album by One Leg One Eye, the Irish band put together by Ian Lynch of Lankum and folk-noise master George Brennan. A second chapter with a sabbath-like, oppressive breadth, in which a monolithic sound takes shape: a dense weave of pipe organ, hurdy-gurdy, layered guitars and strings merging with hypnotic, minimal, floating field recordings.
The relentless repetition of a handful of notes, typical of traditional folk ballads, goes hand in hand with the spiritual, psychedelic, primordial minimalism of a music tinged with black metal.

Fourteen minutes and eighteen seconds: that's how long the band needs to lay bare the entire sonic knowledge that the music of Swans and the film scores of Derek Jarman have turned into contemporary artistic language.
With “Neither Fell nor Flesh”, Lynch and Brennan recreate the prophecy of the old witch who gives the album its title, conveying a sense of doom through deep rumbles, hurdy-gurdy-like moans and sharp, piercing bursts. Arid, scorched, silently shadowy, the droning synth textures and other musical sources — not necessarily identifiable or identified — become ritual forms in search of a divine or diabolical presence to commune with.

The title of the first track, “Many Are My Names Behind”, is drawn from an Irish mythological tale about the goddess of war, here voiced by the celebrated actress, performer and writer Olwen Fouéré. Another piece in the band's rich and complex fascination with the darkest pages of Irish tradition, a musical-literary narrative fed by avant-garde extremes, goth-folk and evocative horror-film scenarios (“Save What Birds Will Bear Away In Their Claws”).
Oddly enough, it's the “mere” four minutes and fifty-one seconds of “What I Shall Follow, I Shall Hunt” that prove the hardest to sit through: dense, muffled noir-noise textures are disturbed by vocalizations somewhere between the animal kingdom and early humankind. A relentless flow of crackles and sounds as evocative as they are unsettling, a journey into pitch darkness and into the bowels of the earth that instil more terror than any horror film.

With such a rich array of sounds, images and suggestions, the music of One Leg One Eye is not only bold but also bewitching and thoroughly unconventional — essential listening for anyone who has savoured artists like Sunn O))), Lankum and Anna Von Hausswolff.

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09/08/2026