SOME bands are meant to flourish in the undergrowth, to avoid the spotlight, to carry on in their singular way without being bothered by music industry nonsense.
One such is Dublin’s Overhead, the Albatross, whose latest album, I Leave You This, continues their superb collage-like blend of instrumental music and occasional spoken word.
As is usual with the band’s music, the best tracks are the longest.
Overhead, The Albatross' I leave you thisHibakusha, Your Last Breath, L’appel du Vide, and Paul Lynch (yes, it’s named after the Irish Booker Prize 2023 winner) stretch over eight minutes, thereby allowing the listener to sit back without interruption, earphones on, lights off, and sink into the music like a pig in slurry.
Adopting a more sedate and sleeker (and cleaner) position is preferable for the music of Eve Clague, a singer-songwriter from Clonakilty, County Cork. Caught in Words is one of those debut albums that catch you off guard.
Forget any preconceived notions of the songs being the work of an ingénue. Rather, Clague’s songs blossom with honest and lived experience, by turns (as Bob Dylan once said) ‘right on target, so direct.’
Other positives include a firm voice that weaves its way through the words and a finger-picking guitar style that lends the songs a serene folk-jazz atmosphere that looks towards the likes of Joni Mitchell, John Martyn, and Pentangle.
Eve Clague's Caught in wordsEqually atmospheric but in a completely different way is the music of Gareth Quinn Redmond, a Dublin-based experimental multi-instrumentalist and composer who has, over the years, collaborated with the likes of Glen Hansard, Villagers, David Keenan, James Vincent McMorrow, and BellX1.
Redmond’s solo music is a thing of rare subtlety (he suggests that his 2023 album, Ar Ais Arís, is best experienced “on a rainy day with a cup of tea”), so Warszawa, his latest album (made in collaboration with Polish musician Albert Karch) is what you might expect: gentle ebbing and flowing of piano/strings/synthesizers, and ice-melting slivers of sound that - rain be damned - are just the return-ticket journeys on a Baltic-cold day as you sip something that may or may not be tea.
Gareth Quinn Redmond's WarszawaArt-pop is something of a catch-all description for any music that can’t be easily defined, or which falls between God knows how many stools.
Dubliner Aaron Corcoran, aka Skinner, is perhaps more aligned with the less demarcated aspects of the genre than anything else, but that still doesn’t give his debut album, New Wave Vaudeville, a pass.
There is much to like about the album, not least its frantically wayward and individualistic approach to tipping a hat to New York’s No Wave scene of the late 1970s, but (as was the case with that scene’s original music) there’s too much going on here to make you love its collage of squalling saxophones and shouty, puffing vocals.
There’s also a sense that Skinner himself isn’t fully committed to using his music as a Brillo pad for the ears, with songs such as Jesus Wore Drag and Here Comes the Rain reaching the quieter ends of the alt-pop spectrum.
Skinner's New Wave VaudevilleSkinner is a new-ish kid on the block, but Kieran O’Reilly isn’t.
The Irish actor/musician has been around the same block a few times; as a musician in bands such as Hail the Ghost, and as an actor in Love/Hate, Vikings (and a forthcoming US show, El Turco). Under the name of Kopium, O’Reilly delivers his debut album, The Weeping Willow, and it’s as steady and smooth a piece of work as you’ll hear all year.
As implied by the album title, the mellow music hints towards the sombre and reflective; the song narratives, too, outline a rare poignancy that occasionally nods to the melancholy yields of Nick Cave and Richard Hawley, and the spooky spirit of Roy Orbison.
Kopium's The Weeping WillowThere are no such tumultuous goings-on in the debut album from two Irish music old-timers, Nick Kelly and Seán Miller. Combining their songwriting talents (and, indeed, continuing their long friendship) in Dogs, the songs on Joy are just that.
The ease with which songs such as Heartbeat, Wide World of Joy, You’ll Never Get Away With That Stuff Over Here, Only Home, and I Know What It Is to Be Young are performed is indicative of musicianly trust, instinct, and empathy.
Quality from start to end? Wuff wuff!
