Partholón: A labour of love for Cork post-metallers

If there’s a nip in the air these evenings that still feels a bit like a shock after such a warm year, the tonic is surely to pile into your local for the chats — a prescription that does both your writer and arriving members of Leeside post-metal outfit Partholón the world of good on a December evening.

Occupying the back room of Henchy’s pub on St Luke’s, and chatting about the state of the world before hitting record, there’s the feeling of sitting down and solving the world’s problems that a good chat will often wrangle out of people — but it’s also a fitting way to get into talking about the band’s second long-player, The Ocean Pours In, releasing digitally on Friday, December 15, with a vinyl release to follow (mockup pictured).

The follow-up.to debut long-player Follow Me Through Body, the album is wider in scope again, picking up on themes of generational change, relationships to our environment, and the nature of humanity amid the exponential pace of modernity — and doesn’t spare the sonic heft in the process, tectonic textural plates shifting tumultuously over the course of its running time.

For guitarist and vocalist Daniel Howard, the album represents a full stop to a similarly heavy period for the band as a venture.

“The biggest feeling I have from it so far is relief, to be quite honest about it, because it’s been such a long process, such a long time working hard. We’re talking six years of effort, really, culminating together, and it’s been frustrating getting it out. We had this record done, a year ago, and two years ago, and we had to revisit it, the pandemic happened, a lot of stopping and starting. So to be honest, the overwhelming feeling at this moment in time is relief.”

“I’m excited, that sense of relief, getting it done finally, even getting it out before Christmas,” adds drummer Alan Setter. “There was a few people who were raising eyebrows, saying, ‘y’know, it’s two weeks or a week before Christmas’. December is tough, you’re up against it, but it’s nice to get it done. Looking forward to starting next year, with something fresh.”

It’s an apt metaphor, your writer observes to the lads, that a record as heavy as The Ocean Pours In would be a heavy weight to carry to realisation. But before he has the chance to mix his metaphors and start on about Sisyphean tasks, the conversation tacks to the album’s overall concept, as well as the themes each song draws on.

Second tune Gathered in Circles serves as the jumping-off point for Howard to explore the topic in depth: “Circles are very, very personal, I suppose it’s more of an orientation than a theme, conversations that I had with my grandfather and father about legends and myths, and truths and lies, using different perspectives on the harbour, in the harbour area.”

“My father was a fisherman, my grandfather was a fisherman, his father was a fisherman, and it’s a specific type of fishing. It’s called draught-net fishing, and the primary function of draught-net fishing is to catch salmon, for food. It’s not a commercial endeavour, it’s not an industry, it’s not something that you want to sell off for a dollar, like.

“So as time has gone on, you see these policies coming in from politicians who’ve never even seen the sea and they decided to focus on this ancient way of fishing, but then you’ve got these trawlers on the outside, which are absolutely ruining fishing stocks, it’s so, so damaging; sport fishing, which no one wants to see — killing animals for sport in any sense, it’s just so terrible, so stupid. So it all stems from conversations that I had with my father, my grandfather, back then.

“Basically, what Circles is, I used to go outside to try to orientate myself using the stars, which I’d never done before. I was so bored, there’s nothing else to do [during the crisis]. Trying to find the Plough, and so on, just tracing circles in the sky to see where I was, and I did it every other day for about a year and just it culminated in this experience, over and over again, so it became repetitive, circular thinking, circular stream of thought. I would get up at four in the morning, an hour to sunrise at that time of the summer, and just wait for the sun to come up. When the sun came up, it was a new day, something to get excited about, rather than just drudgery of the pandemic, lockdowns and so on.”

The writing of the album proved to be more of a granular process than the storytelling would have you think, mind, with songs beaten into something approaching their current forms just before the pandemic, and the intervening years presenting the band with the opportunity to refine the arrangements and performances before recording and post-production with a number of collaborators, including longtime producer Shaun Cadogan.

“‘Follow Me Through Body’ was very, very quick, maybe 18 months to write, and recorded in three days. It’s like ‘bang, bang, done’”, says Howard. “With this one, I first started writing seven, eight years ago, on an acoustic guitar, trying to form some sort of folk element of it, just me and a guitar and words, just singing and figuring it out. And then when it comes to the lads, it becomes something completely different, everybody figures that through their own their own channel, or whatever you want to call it.”

“We also had the lineup changes”, adds Setter of the departures of former members Alex Hayes and Dillon Bean. “We got Cian O’Callaghan and James Coady on bass, then they had to leave, life happened, the pandemic and so on. We’ve James Grannell and Barry Murphy now.”

“We wrote the album with [their 2020 line-up] initially, and we were ready to record it in 2020, and we had a stab at recording it and then we had the time, I guess, to kind-of think about it. It stalled slightly, life got in the way, so we started afresh. We had the basis of the songs, but I mean, if you listen to the first recording, compared to now, they’re miles apart.”

“This one has just been, like, two years of really hard labour, and then it falls apart. We go two years again, and get to the point of being ready, and it falls apart. And then we get there again, but when the lads came in, I think we had been through that mill so many times, that you just have that extra bit of determination to push it over the line,” adds Howard.

“The lads came in and had their own perspectives on it. There were bits of the songs that were just not tying together at the end, and their contribution was really to shore up all those loose edges and put it back together again. Very proud of it, we really are, really proud of the work we did. It wasn’t always fun.”

Partholón’s second LP, The Ocean Pours In, releases on Friday, December 15, for download and streaming from https://partholonian.bandcamp.com/, and across streaming services. A vinyl release and gigs are slated for 2024.