New Irish albums reviewed and rated: The Would-Be's, Varo, Curtisy and Pete Holidai
The Would Be's: HindZeitgeist (Roundy Records) ★★★★☆
The Would Be's
were stalked by several big record labels back in the 1990s, but notions of mainstream commercial success quickly unravelled. The Co Cavan band persevered fitfully, split up and then returned with all their original members almost 15 years ago. Some bands are best left to memory, but HindZeitgeist shows that there's always room for indie-pop melodies that linger in the sunshine. Stay Tuned is a superb James Bond theme song in waiting. That's How It Gets You is a shoo-in for a song of the summer, and Stupid Little Heart is a love anthem that Johnny Marr would be happy to have written. It continues with a persistent DIY superiority: three Finnegan brothers (guitarist Matty, bassist Eamonn, drummer Paul), one sassy saxophonist/trombonist (Aidine O'Reilly) and one quality singer (Julie McDonnell).
Varo: The World That I Knew (Self-released) ★★★☆☆
Varo
– Lucie Azconaga and Consuelo Nerea Breschi – have been integral to Ireland's trad/folk scene for about a decade. During this time they've gathered like-minded musical friends and delved into the song archives. The aim of this resourceful collaborative album, which sees the Dublin-based duo perform with John Francis Flynn, Ruth Clinton, Niamh Bury, Junior Brother, Ian Lynch, Anna Mieke and Lemoncello, among others, is to highlight the value of authentic human experiences, good and bad, across the centuries. Between elegant versions of Green Grows the Laurel (with Flynn), Let No Man Steal Your Thyme (with Lemoncello) and Work Life Out to Keep Life In (with Bury), Azconaga and Breschi have achieved that and more.
Curtisy: Beauty in the Beast (Brook Records) ★★★★☆
Hot on the heels of last year's RTÉ Choice Music Prize nomination for What Was the Question, his debut album, the Dublin rapper
Curtisy
releases a collaborative 12-track mixtape that sieves happiness out of hopelessness. Working with the producer Hikii (who arranged several tracks on What Was the Question), the new songs flow smoothly across a blend of sample-heavy soul/jazz-influenced hip-hop. There's a particularly smart cinematic sensibility on tracks such as Fuss, Milk & Honey, Eyes, RIP2ME and The Necessary Evil, the collection's standout track, which includes a sample of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. Curtisy's lyrics and delivery are equal to those of any contemporary rapper you care to mention.
Pete Holidai: Electric Jukebox Volume One (Pilgrim Sounds) ★★★☆☆
Anyone who fancies playing a game of spot the glam-rock music act can safely listen to Electric Jukebox without fear of boredom. The latest solo album from the stellar musician and producer
Pete Holidai
pays homage to the music that foreshadowed punk rock. A New Revolution is such a New York Dolls tribute that you can almost taste the lipstick, Daydream Girl has David Essex channelling Roxy Music, and We Had a Vision is the cheekiest blend of two David Bowie songs you know very well. In other words, this is good, clean fun delivered by someone who knows what's what every which way and inside out. Volume Two soon, if you don't mind.
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Irish Times
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The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine: A sparklingly polyphonic debut novel set in modern Belfast
The Benefactors Author : Wendy Erskine ISBN-13 : 978-1399741668 Publisher : Sceptre Guideline Price : £18.99 It was part of the mission of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) to explain the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky – to explain, that is, why Dostoyevsky's novels, with their endless side-trails of backstory, do not really resemble most of the novels published in the late 19th century. Dostoyevsky's contemporaries – Arnold Bennett, Henry James – were forever complaining that novels such as The Idiot and The Possessed were shapeless, rambling, inchoate. Henry James memorably described The Idiot as a 'fluid pudding'. For Bakhtin, these criticisms missed the point. Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin said, did not belong to the 'monologic' traditions of western thought and western fiction. He did not, in other words, conceive of a novel as the utterance of a single (if perhaps concealed or disavowed) authoritative voice. Instead, Dostoyevsky's assumptions were 'dialogic'. 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Erskine never gives you the tiniest hint that one particular point of view, one particular character, might be preferred, might be central. 'The benefactors': in the most immediate sense the title refers to an OnlyFans-style website, 'Bennyz,' short for benefactors, on which young women do online sex work for men who send them money. Erskine's finely tuned ear for language, and for its contemporary modes of evasion and concealment, allows her to ventriloquise the jargon in which this seedy operation cloaks its inequalities: 'Tertiary factor is access to exclusive content, dictated by the beneficiary.' READ MORE On Bennyz, the men are the 'benefactors', though really, of course, we understand that it is they who are the beneficiaries – of patriarchy, one of the novel's deep subjects. Misty, the teenage girl who ends up an unwilling, and often unwitting, link between all the book's separate characters and voices, has a Bennyz account. 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Irish Times
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Leo Varadkar says politicians should not censor artists following Keir Starmer Kneecap remark
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