If you’ve been tuning in around here for a while, you may have caught me enthusing about the state of Ireland’s home-grown singer/ songwriter scene over the past couple of years. I feel I’ve had good reason since I’ve been lucky enough to witness the coming of bands like Bray Vista, David Hope & The Henchmen and Ian Whitty & the Exchange to name a few of the best.
If you think this is some risible attempt a creating a ‘scene’, then forget it right now. However, there are two important aspects of their craft such disparate units have in common. Firstly, they are all devastatingly good live bands and secondly, they are led by talented individuals with rare abilities to write beautifully-crafted and hard-hitting songs about living in precarious modern-day Ireland.
Another band with similar qualities is Cork City-based Roots-Pop-Folk troubadours JOHN BLEK & THE RATS. Having stumbled upon them playing at a festival in West Cork last summer, I was immediately struck by them, not least because they ploughed confidently through a set stuffed with hook-filled songs that stayed with me for ages afterwards.
Amazingly, while the band are fast becoming seasoned road dogs (the tour surrounding this release is impressively lengthy on both sides of the Irish Sea), ‘The Tide Will Rise Again’ is actually their first official single. It’s a belter too: a fiery and direct anthem about the new Irish diaspora (“there’s a smell in the air of defeat and despair as the young all declare they must leave their homes”) played with urgency and skill and delivered with customary vocal passion by John Blek.
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I’m hooked already, but the additional tracks ‘Rosie’ and ‘My Light Went Out’ acquit themselves equally impressively. ‘Rosie’ is a bittersweet, Country-tinged ballad steeped in temptation and falling out of love, while the closing ‘My Light Went Out’ is a touching banjo-assisted lament written by guitarist Patrick Freeman and is a quiet little gem on its’ own merits.
In such days of economic depression, we need bands of this calibre to chronicle the times more than ever. In that sense, ‘The Tide Will Rise Again’ strikes a particularly eloquent chord right now, but the exciting thing is that it’s merely the first of John Blek & The Rats’ magnificent blue collar anthems. Mark my words: you’ll be hearing a whole lot more about these guys before too much longer.
John Blek & The Rats on MySpace
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