Review: Pictish Trail – Island Family


Pictish Trail Island Family




The words on the Isle Of Eigg’s own website light it up with praise, as you might imagine, boldly claiming: ‘We’re sure you’ll love Eigg as much as the islanders do.’

There are only a hundred or so hardly souls there all year, and they themselves might not be best placed to articulate the benefits of living on a fifteen square mile patch of rock situated as part of the Inner Hebrides.

Eigg is, you’d reckon, the kind of place that chooses you rather than the other way round, but it seems that sense of wonderment and devotion doesn’t apply to all of the islanders. Or at least, it didn’t.

Johnny Lynch, AKA Pictish Trail, moved there from Fife a decade ago in the aftermath of an acrimonious fallout with Kenny ‘King Creosote‘ Anderson, and since arriving he’s built a house, started a family and created a festival, ostensibly embracing everything which it can offer the committed.

Despite the remoteness however, up until the beginning of 2021 Lynch was a musician like most others, spending life on the road around Britain and Europe in the company of his own distinct brand of electro-folk, a reel he concocted latterly on Thumb World and prior to that, the career-high Future Echoes. Then, the rest of the world quickly shrank.

The pandemic enforced stay at ‘home’ meant lots of things; from long walks, near endless days and ceilidh dances, but also having to confront a surprising aspect of his nature, an odd one given the choice of where to move to: ‘I’ve never been much inclined to write songs about nature…I’m just not that much of an outdoors person.’

Wow. Thankfully, the good news is that a year of relative solitude brought about some (apparently) much needed perspective, which in turn informs the basic structure of Island Family and in the process helped overcome a bout of writer’s block.

If Thumb World marked a steady change of course from its predecessor’s dreamy ambience, the forced inner peace of recent times here leads to outer signs of old precepts being torn or cracked.



The titular opener chatters with a vintage, inorganic menace before giving way to a playground chant of a refrain, whilst the jarring electroclash of Natural Successor shows at least that geography is no boundary to imagination under the same sky.

There are some northern lights still, closer Remote Control and Thistle both gentler breezes, the former sounding a bit like Hot Chip playing an Italian disco in the 1970s with some broken equipment.

They’re exceptions as opposed to rules though; In the Land of The Dead – with its tilting, 8-bit patina – never quite seems to locate or want a tune, and elsewhere It Came Back appears to be fighting with itself, lofty pop versus stabs of white noise, a conflict that seems like the discordant neo-psychedelia of Green Mountain to both thematically cast and stylistically overhang the whole album.

Maybe Lynch is now finally writing about Mother Nature, but as an abstract characterisation a figure that can be vengeful and hold grudges for those who don’t take her/it seriously.

Island Family reflects that caustic hardness, one which may surprise those hooked on Pictish Trail’s gentler past. You guess they know much about making sacrifices on the Isle Of Eigg, but this is one of which only time will reveal whether it was worthwhile.


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