Album swap - So Cow vs. Estel

In this album swap, Tuam’s So Cow was paired up with Aonghus McEvoy, a member of Dublin bands Estel and Drainland.

Love Visions
No Bunny
1-2-3-4 Go! Records (2008)

So Cow on why he chose this album to swap:
The dumbest, saddest, jumpiest party album in the world. Nobunny is 80% man 20% rabbit mask. Goofy power pop from a yearning preacher. Chuck Berry Holiday is the best pop song this decade. Nobunny loves you and should be in Europe sometime this year.

Aonghus (Estel) says:
No Bunny? With a name like that I was a little worried I’d have to sit through thirty minutes of ironic, yelpy, casio-worshipping horseshit. Thankfully on ‘Love Visions’, No Bunny fire through twelve fuzzed-out songs that bring bands like The Ramones to mind (I guess the reference on the cover gave that away). However, this doesn’t fall into the retro camp; weird little effects and drum machine parts dotted around the album give it a more modern sound, creating the kind of spazzy, naive atmosphere that treads just on the right side of insincerity. Consciously writing songs with this kind of feel usually makes me view bands as snot-nosed, too smart for their own good hipsters that need to fuck off back to 1998 and leave their in-jokes there, but it really works on ‘Love Visions’. Maybe this is because a sense of fun pervades throughout the record, the songs are well constructed, catchy, and most importantly, a sense of enthusiasm is present.

Although this wouldn’t be the kind of record I’d usually pick up, any listener will immediately notice the focused song writing within. Very few tracks hit the three minute mark, no riffs are overplayed, anything that’s present works, and functions well within the overall structure of the album. The problem with many straight ahead albums is that they can be repetitive and lacking ideas, by the fourth or fifth song your mind starts to wander and you begin to look around for another record. Keeping the length of ‘Love Visions’ to a bare minimum has served No Bunny well, the album can be easily digested as a whole and leaves you wanting more rather than forcing the listener to file it away for another six months. ‘Love Visions’ isn’t a life changer, but still worth giving a listen if you’re lacking some really fun music. The guy also wears a rabbit mask, cool.

Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings
Sun City Girls
Majora (1993)

Aonghus on why he chose this album to swap:
‘Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings’ first tore my mind apart at the tender age of seventeen. In hindsight I might describe this Lp as a punk rock take on the master musicians of Joujouka but I don’t know if that comes close to the mark, or even does either party any justice. This is totally primitive psychedelica that will drill a hole into your skull and blast further and further into your confused little brain.

So Cow says:
A few facts. I’ve just finished listening to this right through for the third time. I’ve had two previous brushes with Sun City Girls. I met one of them on the street in Galway in 2003. He was bearded wildly and wearing a WFMU shirt. The second time was in Montreal last year. We played the same festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo, at the same time on the same night, across the road from each other. I can’t claim to know their stuff at all. That’s the state of play going in to this.

Side A is one track, 22 minutes of what is called ‘The Venerable Song (The Meaning Of Which Is No Longer Known)’. We’re two minutes in and, due to experiences at the coalface of early-millennium instrumental rock, I’m all expectations of build. The riff is steady. Percussion fills out the stereo field. The cymbals and clicks remind me of traditional Far Eastern music I’ve encountered. I base that on nothing but obvious similarities. There’s plenty chanting and gurgling, in a language I’m going to assume is made-up bollocks. A number of times there is build and force and my Pavlovian Slintnipples harden but SCG pull the rug pretty quick. 10 minutes in, Sun City Girls-drummer-dude starts going for the toms and it feels like all manner of hell is about to break loose. It doesn’t. Glockenspiel and a recorder enter the fray. The made-up bollocks gets more frenzied at times, like a particularly dramatic episode of a Korean period drama.

Side B is two tracks, both titles of which are going to eat into my word count. Things on this side are gloomier and more exotic, middle eastern guitar flourishes, awesome percussion and, on ‘Omani Red Light’, what sounds like a bagpipe being played through a tin whistle. Things get quiet, track titles change and ‘Multiple Hallucinations Of An Assassin’ starts with some routine stretching before chugging and tripping its way to an end, the last three minutes of which are particularly ace.

The mp3 player plays on. ‘Paperhouse’ by Can starts up, which a more articulate man or woman could wrap up with the previous two paragraphs in a fanciful description, using the word continuum at some point. But I’m a bit thick like that, so I’ll just say I enjoyed the listen a lot.

Estel, Steve Mackay and Mike Watt

Imagine for a minute that the Irish rock underground is a scary warren of tunnels. A bit like somewhere from the land of Mordor in Lord of the Rings except you can access it through a secret portal in the Lower Deck or the Boom Boom Room. It’s a cold, damp, labyrinthine place full of discordant, relentless, yet fascinating music. If bands like Adebisi Shank and Bats are the freshly-hatched spawn who guard the gates to this netherworld, chances are that Estel reside somewhere within it’s darkest vaults. They’d be a huge glowing maggot, or monstrous spider, an enigmatic creature that has resided beneath Dublin for ten years now, dreaming up dark, uncompromising instrumental music, oblivious to the fads and fashions of the world above.

The latest release to ooze forth (in keeping with the dodgy Lord of the Rings allegory) from camp Estel is an untitled album of tracks named after the four gospels, with a cover of The Stooges ‘Fun House’ thrown in for good measure. The album is a collaboration with Stooges saxophonist Steve Mackay and Mike Watt who played bass with practically every American hardcore band you can shake a stick at.

I know what some of you are thinking. “The four gospels? This stinks of self-important dreck.” I thought the same, until I saw the track-listing on my iTunes player. ‘Matthew’, ‘Mark’, ‘Luke’ and ‘John’ are punctuated, beautifully, hilariously and surely intentionally, by ‘Fun House’. This is apparently the gospel according to Estel. A reading where his great unholiness Iggy rubs shoulders with the four scribes.

The music itself was recorded in a short burst (perhaps because Watt and Mackay only had so much time on their hands), but as such, provides an engaging document of what happens when this sort of endeavour works. Rather than melting respectfully into the background, as others might do when working with their heroes, Estel are clearly the measure of the their collaborators. The first half of the album is more uneasy than the second. The band weave an urgent, undulating tapestry of sinister sonic matter on ‘Mark’ and maintain a remarkable piano refrain that not only supports Watt’s saxophone, but sounds like the product of months in the studio rather than an afternoon’s improvisation.

‘Luke’ and ‘John’, the two tracks that follow a respectful reading of ‘Fun House’, are lighter affairs. On ‘John’ in particular, the music seems to float endlessly upwards, and Mackay’s sax sounds like a balloon let loose from a net, drifting into rarefied spaces in the upper atmosphere. For an album recorded in such a short space of time, this is a remarkably expressive and coherent piece of work and testament to this band’s importance in the Irish underground.