Coming straight out of art school, Times New Viking have been surfing a wave of “critical acclaim” big enough to drown Holland this year. Part of their selling-point seems to have been their intentionally poor recording technique. Because of their methods, ‘Rip It Off’ sounds quite a bit like it’s been fed through a distortion pedal and a phone speaker. Of course, many other bands have used home-recording to make albums nowhere this abjectly noisy, so the question must be asked - is the DIY thing affected? It’s hard to see another way of explaining it off. The fuzz acts like a built-in excuse, a buffer between the band and the listener. It even makes listening to them slightly painful.So it can get annoying.

Luckily, there is an excellent album somewhere underneath. They make a very American brand of guitar-driven indie pop, as it sounded circa 1994. Names like Yo La Tengo and Guided By Voices spring to mind throughout, and while Times New Viking aren’t necessarily breaking new ground, they’ve made a really endearing album here. Every song is short and to the point, with unschooled male and female vocals bellowing hooks and unpretentious everything else backing them up. It would be eminently listenable, if it wasn’t for the dense layer of obfuscating fuzz.

Songs like My Head and Drop-Out are insistently catchy, and they can switch gears with more sprawled (though still short) tracks such as The Wait. The highlight overall, however, is probably the last twenty seconds of End Of All Things. Fourteen tracks into the album and two minutes into the song, the fuzz drops for the first and only time, leaving two voices and a guitar. It’s like a revelation, a first glimpse of something that’s been on the cusp of appearing for forty minutes. It may take a little more time to get to the rest of the music, but it’s worth it.

Some songs on MySpace. Out now on Matador Records in a record store near you.

7 Guitars With A Cloud Of Milk is the puzzlingly titled sophomore effort from slightly cracked French trio Gablé. On a self-proclaimed “luxury DIY” label from London called LOAF, Gablé’s effort doesn’t really allow itself to be judged by regular album review criteria. It is best described as a sort of lo-fi pop cabaret, with different approaches and textures flying out of the speakers briefly and then being replaced straight away with new ideas. About half of the time, the songs are sung by a man and a woman, both with French accents. Nothing surprising there. But the rest of the time, someone with a vaguely comical English accent recounts stories over the music. These are generally quite funny.

The opening track, Noone Knows Why, tells of a group of people that depopulates gradually due to unlikely methods of suicide. The only track that beats this is the closer, Drunk Fox In London, which is a dialogue between someone extolling the virtues of the fox, and a fox planning to get drunk and eat people. It ends with a glitchy electro wig-out. There are a few of those over the course of the album. Apart from electro, retro French vinyl loops and elementary piano make appearances as musical backing.

It would be an overstatement to say that 7 Guitars With A Cloud of Milk is actually good. More reasonably, it should be called “interesting”, because it is undeniably that. Around every corner is a different reason to laugh or furrow the brow. A singular way to spend an hour.

Check out some tracks here. Album’s out on the 19th May, buy it in a shop.

Probably no point in ever listening to anything else. More news here:

I’m having a creative lull at the moment, and I haven’t blogged here in a while, so I’m going to take advantage of this little platform to get some essay rest and try hard to make more people love one of my favourite bands. Isn’t that what it’s all about? So here we go.

I had a nice morning this morning. I woke up really early (relatively speaking - I am a student and it is still Easter holidays) and ended up walking from Heuston Station down the quays into college. The air was fresh, the morning was buzzing and the gypsies were rude. These are the moments mp3 players are made for. So I drew my ageing Zen from my pocket, begged it not to crash again and got my scrolling thumb ready to go through a hundred and fifty bands ten times before finding something. But I was in a certain type of mood, so I went for Sunset Rubdown.

I will always love Wolf Parade, even if they never actually get the second album made, because they were the first 18s gig I ever saw (with a terrible fake ID) and I like Swan Lake, whose best songs are by Spencer anyway, a lot too.

But I still get the feeling that Spencer Krug’s real creative efforts, where he truly lets fly with everything he’s got, are in Sunset Rubdown. You can tell by listening to what he does with other people. Swan Lake is reasonably restrained stuff, even though his songs are really good. It’s a definitive side-project thing. And Wolf Parade, even though it broke him and Handsome Dan into the indie version of the mainstream, seems to stifle the tangential, image-laden, ADD quality in his songwriting and distill it into something approaching regular “rock”. That puts me off.

Random Spirit Lover came out around the middle of last year, but I didn’t get around to listening to it until December, and even though I don’t really believe in “growers”, it took another month again for it to strike me how brilliant it is. It’s hard to come to grips with it at points because it’s so dense. Between Spencer’s organ and piano (and sometimes both at the same time) and the snakey guitar lines, the unschooled drumming, the mysterious female backing vocals and the desperate, wordy lead vocals, there is always a melody somewhere trying to edge another one out. The pace quickens and slackens between songs, and even though everyone does it nowawadays, the way they go from quiet to loud and back can really get to you.

Lyrically (sorry Darragh), it’s really, genuinely great stuff. It’s like reading a Russian novel on top of incredibly dense keyboard-driven indie music. Except it’s not. The images are thrown on thick and fast. People are animals very often, God and religion shows up centrally and in cameo roles, people argue over whether things are just smoke or in fact Poseidon’s beard… and it’s never a tongue in cheek thing.

Some people seem to like the previous album, Shut Up I Am Dreaming, better. While that is also an incredibly good album, I have a feeling they’re not giving enough time to Random Spirit Lover. Either that or they have got ear wax backed up in their ears and need a syringing. Maybe. It’s possible.

They’re playing here on the 20th May, the same night as Broken Social Scene. But seriously, how is that even a decision?

Here is a video of them live (there are no speakers where I am so I have no idea how this sounds, but I wanted to use a video of a song off the new album and the YouTube comments said the audio quality is good - so it must be, right? I’ll change it later if not.)

Last night the editorial team and myself took time out of our busy schedules to take a peek at new monthly music magazine State in the Jameson distillery in Smithfield. It was pretty empty when we got there, and there were piano versions of 90s rock songs emanating from the corner. Bit of a bizarre feeling. The free whiskey floating around helped to quell the shame of being dressed like a badly-dressed student in a room full of formal-casual professionals though, and before long the place filled up.

The magazine itself looked pretty good. Michael Stipe on the cover seems to have split the masses. One side says that having a band approaching their fourth decade on the cover of the first issue of a music magazine is a bad idea. Especially when the magazine was widely assumed to be pitching itself a couple of steps hipper than Hot Press. But hey, Q had Paul McCartney on their first cover, and they’re still selling.

The pragmatic view of the Stipe cover is that REM are popular, and State needs to sell. This makes sense. It’s commendable that they’re making sure every Bally in Ireland gets copies in their local Spar. But it does mean that they’re putting an alternative music magazine into places that don’t have broadband internet or ready access to the stream of indie bands that pass through Camden St and environs.

In general, it’s a good read. It’s beautifully designed, for one thing. It’s way less busy than Hot Press, even if it does include the non-music pages at the back like every magazine ever. Cadence Weapon is a good article, Ham Sandwich was a good idea. It’s worth picking up, definitely.

The trouble is - is it worth €5.50? Decide for yourself, it’s in shops from the morning.

Dublin is experiencing a little uncharacteristic sunshine (if not heat) in the last few days, and spirits are high. So it is the perfect time to talk about El Guincho, even if we are not the first to do so. If ever there was music to help the imagination stretch a little extra light into a beach party of the mind, Guincho’s album Alegranza is it.

According to my handy pocket Catalan-English dictionary, guincho (m) means “black-headed gull; scream, shriek; squeal, screech”, but I think it’s fair to say that the first animal that he brings to mind is the Panda Bear. The widely-levelled (and easily justified) charge that El Guincho is basically just a Spanish Noah Lennox is difficult to escape. Their sampling styles and even their samples are very similar, to the extent that you could guess Guincho bought his SP-303 with the intention of becoming the Spanish Noah Lennox.

What makes El Guincho worthwhile by himself (apart from the fact that Panda Bear probably won’t follow up Person Pitch for a long time) is that he deviates from the straight rhythm. He is a Mediterranean soul, after all, and vaguely Latin beats pervade the best songs on the album. Kalise, especially, is syncopated enough to make dancing not only forgivable but irrepressible. Check it out a load of tracks on MySpace.

The Guinch comes to town for Antics at Crawdaddy on the 26th March. €5 in, no excuses.

“Holly, Michigan is a small town full of small-minded people”. Our Brother The Native are a band that seem to come straight out of suburban middle America. There is nothing small-minded about their music, however. It is experimental and ambient, and above all it is imbued with an over-riding sense of space. Heima showed us that Sigur Rós are making the music their landscape commands, but it is a testament to the artistic powers of this trio that they can conjure music of such scope from a world of white picket fences.
The obvious thing to mention about Our Brother The Native is their age. Of the trio, only John-Michael Foss could legally attend gigs in clubs in America. Chaz Knapp is close too, but has his own DIY label to keep him occupied instead. Josh Bertram, who I talked to, is eighteen and not long out of high school. They met over MySpace in 2005 and signed to the same label as Animal Collective and Sigur Rós in 2006. And their latest album, ‘Make Amends For We Are Merely Vessels’, is not even their debut. It can’t have been easy starting out in the weird world of freak-folk and post-rock that their dense, pastoral music inhabits.
“The reviews of [debut] Tooth and Claw made me think we weren’t taken very seriously. But I feel anyone who has met us or seen us hopefully could understand that we are very serious about our music”, Josh says. That’s that then. “I know for me, college is just for the time being. The band and music is my definite priority and passion in life”.
The band’s formation is a matter of some discussion too. Josh and John Michael met in high school in Michigan and had started playing together, but Chaz lives in California. How did they even find each other? “I contacted Chaz through the MySpace for his DIY label Delude Records. He had been putting out some really interesting obscure folk recordings and I told him that if he ever needed a new release to contact us. So he did. He was really adamant about putting out something of ours. We put out the six-track EP “Cheer Up My Dear, The Sun Will Shine Again. Over the course of working on the recording, we became great friends. I talked to Chaz on the phone almost every other day. We started to do collaborations via e-mail on two songs, and they turned out beautifully. So I thought we should just add him to the band. He accepted the invitation, and that was that.
Tooth and Claw was received as a record from the New Weird America camp, but Make Amends… is much more panoramic and spaced out. Combining that sort of cinematic quality with falsetto vocals was always going to draw comparisons to Sigur Rós. This is not a problem for Josh.
“That is an endearing compliment to have. To be compared to Sigur Rós is an honour, and I will always strive to make our music as dramatic as some of Sigur Rós’ work. However I think we are much different in terms of what we are trying to convey. We will always be much darker in mood. I also think there is a little more experimentation happening on our part. I try not to have many rules for us when we go about writing a song.” And the vocals? “The falsetto comparison I can understand, but I have been singing that way long before I heard Sigur Rós. I have a weird fascination with women’s voices and hushed, cute vocals. Also I guess I have always wanted to have a range that fits the mood of any style I want to sing.”
Fat Cat signed the band after Chaz sent them a link to their MySpace in the hopes of getting some constructive criticism. The label liked what they heard and asked for a demo. They liked the demo even more, and instructed the band to record a full-length album with a view to releasing it. For an experimental but still mostly teenage band, to share a label with the likes of múm and Sigur Rós must have been exciting.
“I would say we feel a closeness to the bands on the label. They are all so amazing, and I feel we share a lot of their ideals. There is a lot of bands on the label trying new ideas all the time and that’s something inherent in our goal as a band as well. But if you’re asking if I think we’re on the same level as múm or Animal Collective or Sigur Rós, I would have to say no way. We still have much more room to expand and grow.” Most bands that lean towards the sort of organic, experimental music Our Brother The Native make come to it through improvisation, or jamming at the very least. It’s interesting to find out how that works in a long distance set-up.”John-Michael and I wrote Tooth and Claw long distance, sending parts of songs back and forth to Chaz until they were complete. On Make Amends… John-Michael and I wrote songs over the course of two years since [the band's first gig, at a Fat Cat festival in] Belgium, playing them live with Chaz occasionally. Parts got added here and there as they aged. When the time came to record, Chaz wrote a load of new parts for it, including the piano base for one song and the entire two parts for The Multitudes Are Dispersing.”
“There is a balance of improvisation and structure. The music part of it has been planned out for the last two years and hasn’t been improvised on the album. But a lot of experimentation I did with the atmospherics in each song came from testing new ideas out to make the songs fresh to me, considering I had been playing them for quite awhile. I do a lot of searching for the right samples to fit each song.”
In an attempt to have a little fun with Josh, I asked him to describe his idea of Ireland. “Lots of pubs, green pastures, Nessie and leprechauns”. Despite this slight gap in knowledge of the specifics of European affairs, he says there’s a good chance they’ll see Ireland this summer. “We actually are looking at a little summer European tour. We have a couple of promoters inquiring about us in Ireland, France, and the U.K.” A good chance to get to know the place a little better perhaps.

“Hi, sorry, you’ll have to speak up a bit, I’m a little deaf”. Phil Selway, drummer with multi-platinum selling, genre-hopping, conscientious stadium behemoths Radiohead, doesn’t quite hear when I say hello. Human after all. Radiohead’s profile was perhaps higher than ever in 2007, due largely to their announcement in October of the release of their seventh studio album, In Rainbows. It’s not so much the music that got people talking though. The little blank boxes on the In Rainbows download page sparked more discussion, debate and parody than anything else in the musical sphere. Even Pitchfork, notorious for specific ratings, left their review score up to us.

There were whispers of a great social experiment, that Radiohead were testing their fanbase and the world to see how much value was placed on their music. If file-sharing democratised music for the masses, then Radiohead were the great established band trying to legitimise that once and for all. Pay as much or as little as you like. It’s up to you.

Nothing is as simple as it seems, however, and reports started to trickle out that Radiohead had made more money with their download than they would have from an ordinary CD release. The only way to own a physical copy of In Rainbows initially was to pay fifty-five euro for the admittedly well-presented discbox release containing the album, a bonus disc, the album again on double vinyl and a book of artwork. Then they signed regular record deals to release the album conventionally too. They were setting a precedent that common or garden indie bands couldn’t follow. They announced a European tour and sparked a backlash due to high ticket prices. The New York Times called it revolution in the music industry, but Forbes called it one of the 101 Dumbest Business Moments of 2007 . Was it revolution? Was it just more capitalism in a different shape? Does it matter? More on the politics later. First and foremost, the music:

In Rainbows took nearly four years to come out, why was that?

Well, we took… [thinking sounds] 2003 to 2007… 2003 was the year Hail To The Thief came out I think, wasn’t it?YeahYeah, so we toured for a year, then took about half a year off after that, away from the band. The actual process of making this record has been about… watch my maths now, but I think it’s been about two years. Two and a half years, actually. A year and a half of what was, with hindsight, preparation really, trying out different approaches to how we would record, just trying to find something that excited us in how we were going to present the material, how we were going to play the material. And then we went in with Nigel Godrich last September [2006]. It’s been quite a painstaking process making the record. Especially when, you know, you start the process and you hope it’ll be fast, but it just isn’t. And when it doesn’t happen spontaneously initially, you kind of know that you’re in for the long run, really, till you get to the point where those moments of spontaneity are there. Not that you construct spontaneity, but you put the right situation together for it to happen. I hope that comes through in the performances. It was a very painstaking process. But we completed it, which is fantastic.

The album sounds very carefully constructed, very complete as a whole. It sounds different to Hail To The Thief, was the process of writing the songs different in any way?

Well, there are similarities. Apart from Kid A, we’ve always started with a collection of songs, and us in a rehearsal studio. And at some point we will have played those songs live as well. So a very similar process from that point of view. We spent a lot more time in the studio this time, so hopefully we got to the point where we felt more comfortable with being there. The biggest difference really was the length of time it has taken. Hail To Thief was a relatively quick record to make, and this one has taken a lot longer. I think with any of our records, a part of what drives it along is a bit of a reaction to the record that’s gone before. With hindsight, I mean, there’s a lot of good things about Hail To The Thief, from our point of view, but there are also elements that we’ve come away thinking “wish we’d done that differently”, or spent a bit more time on that. So you act on those impulses on the next record you make.

You’ve put out an extra disc in the discbox version of In Rainbows. Was it difficult to decide which songs to put on the actual album proper, which to put on the bonus disc, and which to leave off altogether?

I think the difficulty came in realising that we’re not going to get everything onto the record. We kind of felt like we put everything on Hail To The Thief, and we didn’t want to do that again. So I think once we got to the point where we’d decided that we want to make a ten-track record, then you actually select the ten tracks that sit well together. So it kind of then decides itself. It was probably a good three or four days of trying out different tracklistings and different combinations of songs on there until we got to the point where it became sort of self-evident which songs sat well together. And oddly enough actually, the second CD sits well together as a collection of songs.So you’d consider the second CD to be a complete…Oh! You’ll have to wait a moment! My youngest son is just about to burst into the room… hold on… [sound of a small child] “Hi Dad!” [Phil, aside, amidst shuffling] Hi Patty! Hold on, I’ll just go somewhere else… Sorry about that.

I think we were pretty much done with that one. Everyone’s been talking about you giving away the album for free, or letting people choose what they want to pay, which in practice means giving it away in a lot of cases. What was the thinking behind doing that?

Well, one of the initial things was actually getting the music out there as quickly as possible. Generally, you get into this… you finish your album, you deliver it to your record company and three months later, after all the marketing processes, the record comes out, having run the risk of being leaked in the meantime. I think for us it was kind of almost leaking our own material, if you like, just at that point being in control of that process. Also, it was having that immediacy of getting the music out there very quickly. It was under a week between the final mastered version of the record getting to us and it going up as a download. That was something we’ve always wanted to, work a bit faster, especially when you’ve been working on a record for two and a half years. You’re just absolutely desperate to get it out there, really. So then you think, okay it’s going out as a download, how do we put it out there? Do we put a price on it? I think the important thing was to get the music around to as many people as were interested, but then at the same time there was scope in there for almost like an experiment, saying, well, what value do people place on the music? We could give people an opportunity to think about that. It seemed a very fair way, and a transparent way of putting the music out.

Certainly novel, as well. Do you feel that releasing the album as a download was equal to a CD release? Do you not think there would be some disappointment for people who weren’t able to go out on the morning and buy a physical copy of the new Radiohead album?

Um… sorry, I think I heard that, you’ll have to excuse me, the line was not quite there. But the whole thing behind it, with the release, it was like viewing as different formats. If you take it from the basis that we want the music to reach as many people as are interested, and if you put out something as a download only, you’re cutting out a lot of people who wouldn’t have access to that. But we’ve never wanted it to be exclusive, we’ve always wanted it to be a CD release at some point. So it is just different formats really. Hopefully there is something there for everyone who wants to listen to the music.

You’ve signed to XL to release the physical album…

Yes.

Thom put out The Eraser on XL, was it because of his experience with the label that you chose to do that, or was there any other reason?

They seem to have a very good understanding of where we are as a band at the moment. And yes, Thom had a very good experience putting out The Eraser with them. When you’re in a position where you’re out of contract, you can view as who is the most appropriate place to release the record, who is the most appropriate label to be with. And XL definitely “ticked all the boxes” on that one.

And how is your relationship with EMI now?

Um… well… we still have a huge amount of respect for all the people we worked with at EMI and Parlophone. There were a lot of people there from when we released the earlier albums, from around The Bends era, and we had a very good working relationship with them. We just felt that ultimately, it wasn’t the right place for us to release In Rainbows.

They’ve put together their own boxset, I believe…

Yes, they have, all of the previous…How does the band feel about that?Um… well, it’s our music, you know… I think we’d prefer to concentrate on the release which we feel most connection to, which is In Rainbows. Um, you know, they’re all our records and of course we stand by them, but we’ve kind of moved on from that point…

Are you afraid that they might try to put out an unauthorised “greatest hits” or something like that in the future? Or is that a possibility?

It’s well within their rights to do it. [sigh]. So we’ll have to see. But as I say, for us the main thing is that we’re excited about the process of releasing In Rainbows and what we’re doing, around the touring, around the way we’re able to release it, and most importantly around the music itself.

About the touring, tickets for your gig in Dublin went on sale this morning… it’s very expensive, it costs €70.70, and there’s been some discussion about how you can justify releasing your album in such a fair way, as you say, and then charge that much for a tour gig?

Right… and what’s been the general response on that, that you see?

There’s been arguments that you might be pricing out some fans, people who may have bought the diskbox, or students who may not be able to pay that much money to be able to go to a gig.Right.Do you have any reaction to that?

Well, whenever we’ve looked at ticket prices and set them, we’ve wanted to make them as fair as possible. So I would hope that we’ve pitched it right on this one, made it as fair as possible on the price. We’ve never really set out to max, as they say, our tour revenue. So I think we’ve always put out reasonably priced tickets. That’s as much as I can say really.

It’s just something that’s come up in the last few days in Dublin.

Yeah.

The use of Dead Air Space [the band’s blog on radiohead.com] during the making of the album, what was the reasoning behind that? Did they the band enjoy doing it? Do they think it was a good idea?

It was just to have that kind of immediacy in what we were doing, really. It was somewhere that if any of the band members wanted to air their feelings about the recording, or put pictures up, if anyone was interested in seeing it then yeah, there was a place there for that to happen. It’s been a good space for us to have. We were able to put our announcement about the download out through there, and that kind of thing. It’s like with the release of the download, it’s a much more direct way of reaching people who are interested in the music. That’s very much the feeling with Dead Air Space. It’s a very honest representation of us, really.

Was there the same sort of thinking behind the Radiohead.tv broadcasts?

That seemed like a lot of fun to do.It was! It was very random, but it was also fantastic for that as well. It was great. Especially after having taken such a long time in the whole recording process, to do something that didn’t have that weight of scrutiny on it, to be in the studio and have loads of different thing going on, happening quite quickly, yeah, it was great! It was fantastic fun, it was a good response to how we’d been working for two and a half years.

You did a couple of covers, The Headmaster Ritual [by The Smiths] and Ceremony [by New Order] I think, how did you decide which to do?

Yeah, our Manchester section really, wasn’t it? It’s funny because when we were at school, we never really played covers. It’s something that we’ve not done an awful lot of either, at any point. We’ve always kind of worked on original material. So to come back at this point and just go in and work on these songs which we’ve all really loved at some point and seeing if we can pull them off… we enjoyed doing those versions of them.

So if those were the songs you were listening to in your youth, are you keeping up with music now?

I hope so! [laughs]

Is there anything in particular that you’ve been listening to recently?

Personally I’ve been listening to Juana Molina, Will Oldham, Adem, Fourtet, those kind of Domino artists… Tunng, that kind of thing. Between the five of us, we’ve got a very broad musical spectrum.

So you’d all consider that you’re staying sort of hip?

Sorry?!

You all consider that you’re keeping up with what’s going on?

You’d get five different responses to that one, depending on who you speak to in the band. Where we are at the moment is just a great love of music, from wherever and whenever really.

With all the political causes Thom has been involved in, in the past couple of years, is there ever a feeling within the band that he’s becoming a bit of a Bono?

[laughs] Two very different characters though, aren’t they?

They are different, but do you never consider what he is doing naff?

No, because he does it from the heart. I don’t think it is naff at all. I think he speaks very effectively on the issues that are very close to his heart. You’re kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t with that one really. I think he uses the platform that he has effectively. He doesn’t, well in my opinion he doesn’t abuse it, he just uses it effectively.

But even in the general sense, it’s sometimes considered that a musician shouldn’t talk about politics. You don’t think that applies at all?

I think if you stop somebody talking about… well it’s the basics of principles here, you don’t want to impinge on anybodies’ free speech, do you? Different people are probably more effective at it, or less effective, but I think in Thom’s case he has a very strong interest, so he has a great grasp of what’s he’s talking about.

Being born and bred in suburban Dublin, almost nothing imaginable has sufficient allure to draw me from the commuter convenience of this city to the wilds of Anywhere Else In Ireland. But the return of ex-pat indiegarten pioneer So Cow from Seoul to his true home in Galway was enough to inspire the trip. I got the phone call from Hi Fi Popcorn, stuffed my last fifty euro into my pocket and made straight for Busáras. Imagine Joy Division in the Hacienda. The Beatles in the Cavern Club. Talking Heads in CBGBs. Now add one to the list. So Cow in Róisín Dubh. 2007’s real best Irish album, “These Truly Are End Times” has been on constant rotation on my mp3 player (if there is rotation involved somewhere within mp3 players) for the past year, and having seen a quite endearing but slightly half-baked performance in Anseo a few months ago, Galway called out to me. So, with amateur digital camera in hand, I went.

After enduring a bus trip that seemed about a week long, and sampling the local cuisine in Supermacs, my associates and I managed to locate the world famous Róisín Dubh. We located ourselves directly beside the stage for the opening set of Big Monster Love, who played to an empty Whelans several hours before Apples In Stereo a few months ago. Big Monster Love is actually from Dublin, and whether by merit or by the nostalgia for our fair city that being away for half a day inspired, his straightforward lyrics about motorway traffic and the trials of love seemed to really speak. It’s difficult to get lo-er fi than a guitar or a Casio keyboard (not both), and singing that is so unpretentious it sometimes just sounds like speaking in a Dublin accent. Whether or not lo-fi has become a compliment, his jams have no frills and no unnecessary parts and they let him go about the business of being a very Dublin poet. The furthest into layering it gets is a backing track on the Casio on the set-closer, Modem Age Dreams. He seems like an honest guy, and his lyrics speak truth, so Big Monster Love gets a solid backing from this musical traveller.

Then So Cow. One relatively undaunting man, his guitar and his mp3 players versus a well-populated bar with free entry on a Thursday night. No problem whatsoever. Everything fast off These Truly Are End Times was played. Some excellent new songs too. Brian rocked out forwards.

And Brian rocked out backwards

And Brian rocked out so hard, his glasses fell off.

And he won the day. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his music, it’s hard to describe. It jumps around. Nerdish guitar rock? Guitarish nerd indie? It switches from song to song. Casablanca starts off busy and ends up cathartic, getting in a very catchy chorus in between before wrapping up before 2.30 is hit. Ping Pong Rock is a rather melancholy love song soaked in reverb. Only it’s not actually a love song, so much as it’s a history of love songs from The Beatles onwards. Curious business. Moon Geun Young is a well-measured noisy pop-rock song about breaking up with someone in Korea under a poster of a teenage celebrity wearing a multicoloured crash helmet and holding a Samsung phone. Something we can all relate to, I think. It’s Over isn’t fast or noisy, but it’s possibly the best So Cow. It’s an acoustic walk through a break up with layered (and slightly out of tune) guitar and harmonising (and slightly out of tune) vocals. All the acrimony of that shittest and slowest of time periods, the post-break-up awkwardness, is evoked. “This is our last song to be sung/Feel free to tell your friends I’m well hung”. Beautiful.

Songs newer than End Times hold up just as well if not better. The only possible complaint one could have (and by one, I obviously mean me after several pints of “Hooker”) was that the plaintive calls from the audience (again, from me) for his cover of The Perfect Me by Deerhoof which showed up on their website was ignored. It didn’t matter. Absolutely worth leaving Our Nation’s Capital for. Special mention too to Gugai, the resident DJ in Roisin Dubh for playing better music than anywhere else I’ve been, including fulfilling our requests for Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend. Dancing around in circles to Peacebone on an empty dancefloor is a memory I’ll cherish for years to come. The highlight though? Last song of So Cow’s regular set: “This is a Paddy Casey cover, it’s called Living It Up”. It wasn’t a Paddy Casey cover, and it wasn’t called Living It Up. It was The League Of Impressionable Teens. If you can have a hit single when you only print 500 copies of your album and you do it in Korea, that would be it. Wondrous stuff. MySpace here.

The Pyramids consist of Sam Windett and Mark Cleveland of the Archie Bronson Outfit. The intention of Windett and Cleveland was to recapture the energy of 60s American Garage bands like The Sonics and the Monks, and in this they have succeeded to a degree. The music was largely written over the course of one weekend and recorded in two sessions in a barn with overhanging microphones catching Windett and Cleveland running through their newly written songs, often for the second or third time. There is an immediacy and enthusiasm perceptible on the album that is refreshing.”Manitou” hints at a monochrome White Stripes, but eventually through repetition and drone ends up sounding more like early Doors. Debut single “Hunch Your Body, Love Somebody” is an exception, recalling the Stooges at their height. Its tune buried under the wall of guitar noise and the desperation of Windett’s vocals renders almost it catchy. It’s unfortunately not enough to save The Pyramids this time around.