“Young but Daily Growing”: ØXN Live at the Everyman Reviewed

By Student Contributor: Cormac Donovan O’Neill

Jazz is the name of the game, but Cork’s premier live music weekend always goes the extra mile.

Newly formed experimental folk outfit ØXN comprises Dublin’s Radie Peat, vocalist of Choice Music prize-winners Lankum, and experimental composer Katie Kim, splitting lead vocals and a glut of instrumental duties; their frequent collaborator on production and live sound, John ‘Spud’ Murphy rounds out the unit on bass and low-end synths, with fellow Percolator member Eleanor Myler on drums/occasional vocals. Some gang alright.

Being fortunate enough to catch one of Lankum’s long-awaited Opera House dates in May, and highly anticipating the next-day release of ØXN’s debut CYRM, their headliner at Cork’s Everyman Theatre - and first live performance - was a shoo-in for my Jazz Weekend.

Stage bathed in red light, the band open with their rendition of the British folk murder ballad “The Trees They Do Grow Tall”. Whilst the band admit their nervousness, it’s an arresting opener establishing ØXN’s bona fides: rendering traditional music’s dark corners with gurgling, abrasive electronics, haunting harmonies, and sparse rhythms. There’s more than a little of Lankum here, but enough Massive Attack or Portishead to be distinct, along with the clear influence of Percolator and Kim’s own sounds.

With their debut comprising only six - albeit, long - songs, the band complete the setlist with cuts from Katie Kim’s own discography; “The Feast” fits seamlessly with the material, as does Kim’s “Heavy Lightning” later. ØXN prove as reverent of the present as they are of the past, with a cover of “The Wife of Michael Cleary”, referencing the last Irish woman burned as a changeling, a spare slice of alt-folk on Maija Sofia’s 2019 record Bath Time, preceded by a warm acknowledgement of the Galway songwriter, in the audience herself.

The set’s first half concludes with a sprawling version of British pop-turned-avant-garde-icon Scott Walker’s “Farmer in the City”. The slow-burner roars to its conclusion, with otherworldly harmonies subsumed in a maelstrom of writhing, growling synth and Mellotron lines from Murphy, Kim, and Peat. The evening’s most exhilarating moment, it’d make a fine set closer were the band to rejig their ordering. Instead, it heralds a twenty-minute break.

Afterward, things pick up with ‘Cruel Mother’, second of ØXN’s two singles. A testament to Peat’s captivating presence as a vocalist and storyteller (and guitarist!), ØXN twist a doomed narrative of a mother who murders her children from chilling, finger-picked beginnings to a thundering full-band finale. Here, Myler is ØXN’s secret weapon, her drumming restrained for much of the track’s run before hurtling to a conclusion atop a Neu!-esque motorik beat.

Soon after in the second half comes ØXN’s first single, “Love Henry”. Although the buzzsaw synths that dominate the recording lose some of their cacophonous power in the setting, Peat’s vocals take centre stage live; it’s different, but no less impressive.

As they approach the end, Peat wryly confesses that the band are nearing the outer limits of “songs we know how to play together”. Though the band term it “40% a joke”, a cover of Bille Eilish’s pop confessional “Happier Than Ever” takes me by surprise. A far cry from the gothic mode the band have occupied for most of the night, it shows another side to the performers, who stifle laughs throughout. Still, the weary bite in Peat’s delivery sells the post-breakup anthem.

It does sit a little uneasy within the set, and one wonders whether it will remain in ØXN’s repertoire. The band’s closer, the Appalachian traditional “O Death”, starkly contrasts the levity of the previous song, and it’s a moment before the intensity permeating the material settles on the room again. Nonetheless, ØXN stick the landing, leaving the Everyman bathed in Murphy and Kim’s arpeggiating synths, and me well impressed.

In the event of a Leeside return, it’s easy to imagine this music inhabiting the environs of St. Lukes; one could see this set taken to the Opera House, should the band attain a level of popular purchase equalling Lankum. It’ll be fascinating to see how this unit develops live, particularly without an an interval interrupting the potent, but glacial momentum of their set. With two engagements in Dublin’s Sugar Club this Samhain season, if the Everyman saw the band at their most tentative, one can only imagine where they might go from here.

CYRM by ØXN is out now on Claddagh Records.