Belfast singer-songwriter Louise Patricia Crane sets herself high standards. Her solo debut album Deep Blue, in 2020, was a beguiling entry point into the multi-instrumentalist’s self-contained world, but the process left her feeling incomplete.
“It just wasn’t the full-bodied thing that I’d had in my mind,” she explains. “For various reasons, the stars didn’t align. So I felt I had a really big point to prove to myself.”
Four years on, Netherworld is the record she’s always wanted to make. A dark fantasia that explores often intensely personal themes through the lens of magic realism – partly inspired by the Brothers Grimm – it’s a feast of dreamlike prog and parabolic psych-folk.
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“I think this album is a complete piece of art in every sense for me,” she says. “And lyrically it’s been a huge journey of self-discovery. In reflecting on my childhood, I had to go back to specific times and events, mining those memories for content. That kind of dug up some bones. I’ve struggled with self-destruction and hedonistic behaviour, so it gets to a point where you think: ‘Why am I this way?’”
Crane dug so deep into her past that she uncovered repressed childhood trauma. She was aged seven and alone in the family house when it was raided by masked paramilitaries who interrogated her at gunpoint. The psychological fallout feeds into songs such as the richly experimental Bête Noire.
“I was in a dark place when I started writing that song. I felt very nihilistic, very low. Bête Noire just poured out of me. But it was cathartic to tap into something through that, it was very freeing. Now it’s my favourite song on the record.”
On Netherworld Crane is backed by a wealth of impressive names, including King Crimson trio Tony Levin (bass), Mel Collins (sax) and Jakko Jakszyk (guitars), drummer Gary Husband and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. Jakszyk was also Crane’s co-producer this time around.
“There’s a certain essence that Jakko understands intrinsically,” Crane says. “A kind of pathos or melancholy or bittersweet quality. We’re on the same wavelength with that sort of musical sensibility. And also the reference points I love are bands that he’s seen, like Gabriel-era Genesis.”
It’s a long way from Crane’s earliest days as a member of cultish goth-rockers Solemn Novena. She later joined The Eden House for 2017’s Songs For The Broken Ones. All this helped bring the notion of a solo career into sharper focus.
“The end goal was always to do something in my own name,” she says. “Netherworld is really the definitive me album. It was terrifying being so vulnerable, but it was all or nothing. I wanted to properly speak from the heart, to create something with soul and depth. Now it’s part of my legacy.”
Netherworld is out now via Burning Shed.
