Lenny Buckley| Staff Writer
Ireland (and Dublin in particular) has always had a thriving live music scene, with new artists sprouting incessantly every year. However, it goes without saying that with such proliferation, what ensues more often than not is vast amounts of mimicry with only a handful of originality. In the last few years, however, there appears to have been a growing impetus for progression and innovation in the Irish pop music scene, and this year’s Hard Working Class Heroes festival certainly had a lot to show for it.
For over a decade now, Hard Working Class Heroes has acted as a platform through which upcoming Irish acts can showcase their talent for a crowd of enthusiasts on the lookout for new music. This year’s line-up – despite its occasional fluffs – was incredibly strong, and exhibited some of the best music to have emerged from the Irish music scene in a very long time.
Beginning with Somerville, the young Galway-based singer-songwriter’s music was one that much of the audience may not have encountered before on account of the fact that she has yet to release anything. Joined by a band on stage, her unhurried and hushed melancholic folk became inflected with what was at times an unrelenting electronic quality. This provided an almost paradoxical contrast and counterpoint in her sound that worked remarkably well and proved to be crucial to her originality. Despite her set being cut short due to time constraints, the spectral quality of her music had the capacity to lull the audience into a trance of mesmerisation and leave them pining for more at the announcement that she was finished after four short songs.
Following Somerville that same night, headlining at The Button Factory, was I Have A Tribe. A lot of people would have caught glimpses of this young maverick during his months touring with Anna Calvi, Villagers, and Slow Skies during 2013/14. During his show, his confessional pop-folk metamorphosed into a volcano of catharsis that built to explosive highs before falling back to captivating and heart-wrenching lows. Two of his songs are available to listen to online, but I Have A Tribe’s sound is one that simply must be experienced live, and his set at the festival was surely testament to this. His live performance of Monsoon, in particular, demanded a silence of the audience that wasn’t heard at any other point during the weekend.
Moving onto Saturday night, taking place on what was a bar illuminated in bright magenta lighting, with a shallow protruding platform, the quaint but ever-so-slightly sleazy Bad Bob’s saw Dublin Beach-Rockers Jet Setter deliver a set to get heads bobbing and hips grooving. Despite the volume being arguably too loud for a venue of Bad Bob’s size – to the point that individual melodies and catchy hooks couldn’t be singled out among the wall of sound –, the band still put on as sunny a show as always, leaving the crowd exhilarated and beaming in the midst of their sensationally minimalist indie-rock vibes.
Following this, over in The Button Factory, after a few years of dormancy, eclectic Alt-Rock Dubliners Cloud Castle Lake put on one of the more impressively phantasmal shows of the weekend. Generally speaking, when a band is fronted by a male falsetto vocalist like Daniel McAuley, it can very often lead to a disappointing live sound (given the difficulties of staying in tune and not allowing oneself to be drowned-out by the music on stage). In the band’s remarkable live set, however, McAuley proved himself more than capable of carrying it off in the dizzying heights reached vocally in Sync, or among the boisterous climaxes of pounding tribal drums, synth and shoegaze guitar in A Wolf Howling.
Finally, of the range of acts on offer throughout the weekend, Meltybrains? were perhaps ones to stand out the most. Their unquestionably chaotic and avant-garde live sound is one that Dubliners will have encountered time after time over the past year at their performances at Knockanstockan, Electric Picnic, and supporting Slow Magic in The Button Factory. It’s difficult to describe the goings-on of a Meltybrains? live show. It is a music of miscellany that pushes the audience’s visual, auditory, and even kinaesthetic perceptions to the very limits of experience and comprehension. Their performance at the festival was comprised of moments of intense techno, ethereal post-rock, and at one point, some sort of choreographed jungle-beat pop music, and made for an altogether exhausting experience for band and audience alike. This is undoubtedly one bunch of lads who are at the very heart of the new wave of music welling up at the present moment, and are a group worth keeping an eye on as they continue to flourish in their bold experimentation.
