Operating under the stage name Talos, Eoin French was an unheralded virtuoso of Irish dream pop. Each of his three studio albums was sublime in its own distinct way, whether conjuring beautifully untethered soundscapes or cradling his expressive voice in otherworldly folk arrangements.
Halfway between My Bloody Valentine and The Lord of the Rings, these were songs that took you somewhere else, constructed with an artisan’s eye for detail (French was a qualified architect) and a poet’s mastery of emotion.
Sadly, French died last year aged just 36. The depth of that loss is underscored by his posthumous new release. A Dawning is a collaboration with the Icelandic composer, producer and DJ Ólafur Arnalds that brims with feeling yet is ultimately not an elegy for French but a celebration of his life.
Given the context, it’s an understandably challenging listen at times. But, in its totality, it is also a hugely comforting one, and credit is due to Arnalds for persevering with finishing the project on his own at his studio in Reykjavík.
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Arnalds is renowned for his sweeping, cinematic work, as perhaps best exemplified by the soundtrack to the ITV drama Broadchurch. Here, however, it is the moments of intimacy that land the heaviest, such as when French takes vocals on the hushed Signs, singing of “our setting sky / that burns across the ocean”.
It’s a poignant image that locates the song in west Co Cork, where a substantial chunk of the LP was recorded and where the coastline can offer stunning views of the Atlantic.
Much of A Dawning was written before French became unwell. For that reason it feels trite to read it as a swansong or his way of saying goodbye to his audience. There is also the fact that his voice has always been marked by melancholy, and A Dawning is in the same register of regretful wonder.
That hush falls heavy as morning snowfall on Bedrock. Here a stark piano backs French’s high-pitched voice; think the Weeknd or Bon Iver standing on a clifftop of the Beara Peninsula, singing to the sheep and the waves.
Because Arnalds and French are so dialled into each other musically, it can be challenging to say where one’s contribution ends and the other’s begins.
That they had a natural chemistry was first identified by Mary Hickson, who encouraged them to work together at her Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival, in Cork.
“She seemed very sure that we would get along musically,” Arnalds has commented. “She was right, of course. It was the start of an incredible, inspiring, heartbreaking but heartfelt journey that took us places we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams.”
Holed up together in a hotel suite – not the sort of place redolent of epic sunsets or craggy cliffs – they hit it off immediately. Signs, the first song they wrote, crackles with the aura of artists comfortable in each other’s company.
The process continued even after French’s cancer diagnosis: the material is alive with a diaristic sense of time in place, such as on the gossamer-light West Cork. Beautifully attuned, French and Arnalds evoke the craggy majesty of the hinterland around French’s home in Clonakilty, where it can feel as if you have travelled to the ends of the earth and that nothing is left but sky, sea and mystery.
The record’s centrepiece, paradoxically, arrives right at the end, with We Didn’t Know We Were Ready. Be warned that this is a heart-wrenching number that is going to reduce even the most insensitive listener to a quivering wreck. It opens with French wondering about the meaning of life and beyond: “With the answers at our feet / Will we break the grounds beneath?”
The song is a hurricane of feeling packed into four minutes, as was made clear when Arnalds performed it on The Tommy Tiernan Show, on RTÉ, accompanied by Dermot Kennedy, The Staves and the track’s co-writers, Niamh Reagan and Ye Vagabonds.
They will play it again when Sounds from a Safe Harbour hosts an evening in French’s memory in September. If this astonishing record is any clue, it promises to be a tear-jerker for the ages.
