Thursday night and the gate is high and it’s freezing. OK, only a few of you might have noticed that I’m (badly) paraphrasing Half Man Half Biscuit, but there’s an impressively large crowd rammed into De Barra’s for a feckin’ cold mid-week night prior to Easter.
Not that it’s such a surprise, really, for every time W&H have seen JOHN BLEK & THE RATS over the past two and a half years (I think this is the sixth occasion tonight) they’ve gradually been inching ever-nearer to acceptance on a much larger scale and every night the audience seems to know more of the songs: a sure sign that things are going in the right direction for any band worth their salt.
On this showing, The Rats are now worth a very large bag of Saxa indeed. One of the most accomplished and hard-working home-grown roots-rock outfits plying the circuit, they’ve released a string of fine, reputation building singles and have just returned from a string of well-received UK dates.
They hit West Cork barely six weeks shy of unveiling their long-awaited debut LP ‘Leave Your Love At The Door’ and they’re brimming with confidence. These Rats are the most able yet too, with lead guitarist Robbie Barron and pedal steel maestro David Murphy both at their consummate best tonight and Aine Mitchell slotting in as the ideal vocal foil for the tall, imposing John Blek (aka John O’Connor).
Though broadly of an Americana-flavoured bent, O’Connor’s songs are always direct, emotive and highly approachable, with redemptive, Nashville-coloured tunes (‘Crucify Me’) rubbing shoulders with the restless likes of ‘Cities Keep Changing’ and ‘The Road’ and the gentler, wistful likes of ‘Rosie.’
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It’s a thoughtful, well-paced set, with most of the tracks from the forthcoming LP making their presence felt, though the home strait is especially captivating, taking in the tense, prison-bound ‘Old St. Catherine’, the heartfelt diaspora anthem ‘The Tide Will Rise Again’ and ‘Trying Times’ with its’ equally defiant, ‘we shall overcome’ lyrical message sounding more relevant than ever as Ireland reels from the arrival of the draconian Property Tax.
There’s more, of course – not least the dramatic ‘Hand On My Heart’ and the inevitable call’ n’ response beano of the set-closing ‘Lord! Don’t Leave Me’ (surely a future single) – and then a well-deserved two-song encore displaying that O’Connor has no intention of resting on his laurels where new material is concerned.
Another triumphant De Barra’s show and another step closer to the future, then. If the LP delivers the way I expect, there should be no stopping this lot. See you back here in a few weeks for the expected thumbs-up then?
De Barra's online
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