A debut of a new indie Irish rock band. I got here from a preview of the single, "The John Wayne". A great track and great video which is an earlier contender as jam of the spring (year...?).The rest of the album, however, doesn't fare as well. Well intentioned, mostly well-written songs are way too derivative of other indie folk rock that has weighed our boredom bags till our backs have broken this past two years.
Track one sounds like Mumford & Sons, Track two like The Joy Formidable. Track three like Florence fronting either of these bands. You'll more like Frightened Rabbit, Bon Iver, the National, etc. At the end of the day, we probably just got to a band too early to make their own mark. Most of the tracks are mellow simple three-chorders which they try to overplay with multi-layered vocals and in one case, some weird vocoder voice effect. Other than that, instrumentation is basic.
Althought I will give it up for the lyrics: "Whenever I am with my friends, I can be as sick as them." - (Them). Still, my advice: hire a drunk percussionist to get you out of your comfort zone.
That's not to say that my favorite track, the previously mentioned western star, is much more original than anything else on the record. You'll hear the same style among those mentioned above. It's just clearly the pop radio tune that mastered first in this collection and then tried to style an album around that. (2 of 5 stars)
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