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.