Review:
'IRREPRESSIBLES, THE'
'KNIFE SONG EP'
- Label: 'NAKED DESIGN'
- Genre: 'Indie'
- Release Date: 'JUNE 2005'- Catalogue No: 'ONDCD002'
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Our Rating:
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THE IRREPRESSIBLES look and sound like a group that will divide opinions violently amongst listeners and who will quite probably look upon the ensuing critical melée with an affected gaze of listless boredom.
Their music draws as equally from the sewer as it does from the heavens, encompassing classical, jazz, vaudeville, folk and pop, squeezing it all into epic mini dramas of the baroque. Jamie McDermott’s androgynous, castrato vocals swoop and hover over the theatrical musical backdrop of predominantly violin and acoustic guitar, sounding like an unusual concoction of Marlene Dietrich, Jeff Buckley and Billie McKenzie. Antony (of Antony and The Johnsons) is probably the closest living comparison.
On the one hand the music impresses with its heightened drama and vivid atmosphere of decadent maudlin, punctuated by instrumental vignettes that add sparkle to the dissolute Bohemian gloom. With its melodramatic stylisations and constantly shifting tempo I find myself imagining a small pit orchestra playing over some silent art-house film from pre-war Germany. The music, however, is almost totally dominated by the vocal performance of McDermott. The net effect can be mesmerising but too often the spell is broken by a tricksy tempo change or by some acrobatic vocal display that reeks of affectation. The whole enterprise is so self-conscious and mannered that its’ contrivance will keep many at arms length: no doubt a reaction that forms part of THE IRREPRESSIBLES’ raison d’être.
The title alone of the third track ‘Lullaby On The Lid Of My Eye’ is enough to set pulses racing with simmering bile but it’s the way McDermott sings breathlessly “I’ll be your queer” that really makes one want to exclaim: “Oh do fuck off darling”.
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Indeed it’s hard not to imagine that the people who will embrace THE IRREPRESSIBLES with open arms will be the kind of people one categorises as “art school wankers”; the kind of people who are very much into themselves and their look and their thoughts (that they often mistake for penetrative insight); the kind of people who only attend gigs (probably advertised as an ‘event’) at some private members club so as to be seen to have been there; the kind of people who fall desperately in love with themselves every single day and are insistent on sharing their emotional onanism with everyone else; the kind of people one finds an awful lot of in London.
Which is no doubt where THE IRREPRESSIBLES will flourish for a season or two.
So yes indeed THE IRREPRESSIBLES’ artfulness does skirt far too closely to pretentiousness that at times I feel like dismissing the whole thing as a piece of posturing self-important crap. That I don’t is down to a begrudging admiration for an undertaking that is so far removed from the everyday fodder with which record companies bombard us that I can’t help but hope that THE IRREPRESSIBLES will get under the skin of a few people and provoke a reaction from at least a small number of the majority who would rather unquestioningly ingest opinion as spoon-fed by the media than do anything quite so radical as form one of their own.
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author: Different Drum
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READERS COMMENTS
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Hi James and Tim,
We have recently had a scathing review from one of your reviewers which we don't feel is at all wauranted.
First of all The Irrepressibles works on projects to make releases without any funds other than what we graft to make from gigs and shitty jobs that we do.
We release all our own stuff, doing the majority of the work, with Steven helping by putting his name to it and dealing with our emails. We work harder than most other bands to project something sincere and uncontrived and because w...shortened comments
------------- Author: JamieMcDermott
29 August 2005
because we experiment and play with musical and visual ideas it seems that we've got a review, not the first one, that suggests our music is pretentious and 'Arty farty' and up its arse and something that most people wouldn't get. From our response and gigs its seems that our music so far seems to communicate with a broad audience both straight and gay and all ages from 18 - even mid 40's.
We just work really really hard and we do it all! Everything! The website, organsing projects with visual artists, the music, the recordings and...shortened comments
------------- Author: JamieMcDermott
29 August 2005
and all without hardly any money (our music video cost 100 pounds to make, food and drink and some materials).
Someone just give us a break for trying to do all that and look at music and culture a little differently, that's not pretentious is it?
Sorry for my rant, its just I work so hard and people in London aren't any more self obsessed than anyone else in the UK or Ireland, and we have never played an exclusive event that that sort of crowd has ever been to.
Your reviewer has totally got us all wrong. ...shortened comments
------------- Author: JamieMcDermott
29 August 2005
And seen as every reviewer seems to paraphrase the others (this one included, on several instances) I was hoping that there might be a chance that you could help us not put everyone off of what we do. We've worked really hard to get to where we are now without a label, I'm northern (North Yorkshire), working class, homosexual, and catholic - I mean I'm not exactly the most pretentious of people born with a silver spoon in my mouth now am I?
There are currently several other bands coming up and around us that have record deals (not l...shortened comments
------------- Author: JamieMcDermott
29 August 2005
(not like us) and that are doing really well in the media. We have been going since 2002 (me since 1999) and have in no-way been influenced by these bands, I'm just scared that everything we've worked so hard for will be reeped by these bands that have had the breaks that we haven't (because we've tredded our own path and not made any concessions). And because they have the deal and the promotional thwack!! its easier for a reviewer to be confident that they are good and they will be seen as key bands of some supposed scene we where supposedly ...shortened comments
------------- Author: JamieMcDermott
29 August 2005
part of.
We love your online magazine which is what makes it all the more painful.
Let me know your thoughts,
Jamie (The Irrepressibles)
www.ofnakeddesign.com
(take a look at this, we run it)
www.theirrepressibles.info
(all the pictures are one collaboration, this is not our image, it's a visual collaboration with Jacob)
(See the review below...)
------------- Author: JamieMcDermott
29 August 2005
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