At some point last weekend I was crippled with a hangover in the back seat of a car hurtling through a twisty part of county Kildare. It was a humdinger of a hangover, the works. Like having your brain brutally mangled then scraped clean by an electrified spud peeler. I wasn’t really in the mood for audio stimulation, but then Tom, the dude who was driving put on a CD. It was quite pleasant, insistent and sparky in a sort of old C86 indie way, but with added bloopy bits. I asked him who it was. Turns out its a few Irish Lads who’ve started to make blips on the radar. They go by the name New Amusement. They have a fairly confident sound for a band just starting out, but wear it sorta lightly and scruffily. Maybe not all the songs on their Myspace page are as quite as strong as the one I heard in the car, Gone to Sea, but there is enough there to demonstrate some serious promise.

New Amusement

On the subject of new(ish) Irish talent, the Vinny Club is one of our weirdest kept secrets. He’s a dude who messes around a lot with the inside of old commodores and shit (I believe its called chip rock) and seems to live in a bizarre digital haven made out of 8-bit graphics and demented pictures of Hulk Hogan eating pasta among other things. The chip rock musical template always runs the risk of sounding two dimensional and gimmicky, and while one or two tracks veer toward annoying game-boy malfunctions, there are plenty of genuinely odd and properly satisfying sonic presents for your eardrums in Vinny’s CGA wonderland. Check it out.

“Vinny”?

Darragh McCausland is saving up all of his pocket money to send off to Guided by Voices so they reunite.
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