ALL THE LUCK IN THE WORLD – A Blind Arcade (own label)

A Blind ArcadeAll The Luck In The World is an Irish band who are embedded in Germany, having moved there to add the Berlin ambience to their Irish musical upbringing in Wicklow and Kildare. Their album A Blind Arcade was released in February 2018 but has only just made its way to Folking Towers for review.

The band point out that they settled on the title A Blind Arcade because it is “an architectural term for a row of adorning arches that are superimposed onto a solid wall. To us it represents the entire process of creating these songs and the sounds within them”.

If you watch the video below for ‘Landmarks’, you can see why they say this – if it weren’t a contradiction in terms, you could describe it as pre-Raphaelite abstract (the leaves rise rather than fall etc.). Similarly, the image above for the album cover is both a stag and a piece of magical abstract painting. If it’s possible to transpose music into the visual arts, these are close representations for the music – there is a solid base to the playing with some nice touches of adornment: the harmonics, the tempo changes, the instrumentation moving in and out of the various tracks. The whole, then, comes together to create a sound which sits somewhere in a line going back to Simon and Garfunkel of the late 60s via the indie bands of the nineties.

As with all of us, our strengths are the obverse of our weaknesses and although I’ve listened to the album a dozen times, I have a warm feeling at the end of it but don’t have a track or a tune that continues to go through my head when it finishes. It’s a mellow, gentle, well-played album – but very definitely an album rather than a collection of individual tracks, 46 minutes of cohesive sound where the tracks blend from the opening ‘Landmarks’ to the closing ‘Abhainn’.

Mike Wistow

Artists’ website: https://alltheluckintheworldmusic.bandcamp.com/album/a-blind-arcade

‘Landmarks’ – official video: