O, Annihilator sees Tirey use an ambient/drone backing that gives the songs a more cinematic feel, pushing the boundaries of folk music while still retaining that traditional quality. As a result, the album could fall into that dreaded category of “experimental”. However, this isn’t experimental in the usual sense, where incongruous sounds are played in the hope of finding some strange off-centre union. O, Annihilator may bring technology into traditional folk but it does so in a harmonious way, where every ambient drone sounds natural and vital to the atmosphere of the track.

Tirey’s previous two releases have been instrumental, so it is very nice to hear the man sing again. He has this tremulous singing voice and he delivers his lines with a real earnestness. Sometimes lovelorn, sometimes weary, he sounds (and writes) a lot older that he actually is. It brings to mind a description of old-time folk singer Dock Boggs by writer William Gay in an essay for Oxford American (and part of the wonderful collection, Time Done Been Won’t Be No More),

“Boggs’s voice here sounds so dissociated it seems to be coming not just from some other time but from outside time itself.”

I’m no folk scholar, so I may be very wrong here, but for me ‘traditional folk’ is less about a particular instrument or sound and more centred on an attitude, a way of writing and playing that exists well beyond the banjo or steel guitar. Tirey writes the sort of songs that sound like oral histories, passed down to him to be passed on again, owned by no-one, there for anyone to interpret.  They sound like the remembered words of forgotten men.

You can buy the album now from Full Spectrum Records, either digitally via Bandcamp or on limited edition cassette.

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