Tenderness is the lovely title of the latest album by Pet Lamb, purveyors of the finest, oh - what would you call it? - Indie, garage and whatever you're having yourself.
Slick on both the eye and ear, Tenderness captures the musical talent, variety and innovation that have become hallmarks of Pet Lamb's well-attended gigs over the past four years. Things haven't always been smooth sailing for the band during that time, however; in 1996 they got ditched by British label Roadrunner after the company had flown them to New York to do their second album with Sonic Youth producer, Martin Bisi. The album was finished and paid for but the record company dumped them anyway.
"It happens to 99.8 per cent of Irish bands," says guitarist/vocalist Dylan, who doesn't seem bitter. "That's an official statistic just made up by me right now, but it's probably true. Irish bands don't get away with making dodgy first albums, whereas most English bands do."
Undeterred, Pet Lamb picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, found a new drummer and started writing Tenderness. They're a tight band who know what they want, enjoy what they do, and keep an open mind. Lou Reed, Neil Young, The Velvets, The Stooges, The Band, The Stones, Captain Beefheart ... "They'd be the ones we don't argue about," says guitarist Brian, who describes these revered elders as "legendaries".
"The longer you're in a band," observes Brian, "the longer you're trying to write songs and everything, the more you realise how good people like that actually are. When we started off, we were a lot more into American underground music, and we're still into certain outstanding contemporary underground bands, but the more you do music the more you realise how much everyone is influenced by those legendary bands."
Dylan concurs with his co-guitarist: "The more you listen to those kind of bands, the more you realise that it was a kind of golden age, and you realise that they had the lion's share of innovation. Mathematically, the things you can do with those instruments - guitar, drums and bass - are limited, and also people had a lot more artistic freedom then: the industry wasn't so 'evil' and all-encompassing and all about money. It was a lot more to do with being an artist, and talent."
"Most bands when they start off," says Brian, "they'll tend to fit in to some kind of genre pretty easily, because that's the reason they get together, because they want to make a certain style of music. But we've been going for so long, and we've never given up listening to music, and the more I listen to music the more the classics rise to the top."
Do Brian and Dylan believe that the PR and marketing machine of today's music industry tend to dictate what directions musicians' creativity should take, to a detrimental effect?
"It tends to be younger bands who get influenced like that," responds Brian. "If you're willing to stick it out no matter what happens, the way we have - and we've never really made any money out of it and we're still going eight years later - "
"I wouldn't recommend it to anybody," chips in Dylan.
" - But the reason we're doing it," continues Brian, "is because we're so into it. And if you're not into it you're going to break up after a couple of years if you're not getting anywhere. If you're really into it, you'll keep doing it, regardless of money."
Commercial success is no real measure of artistic achievement, though, and as an example Brian and Dylan cite Neil Young, Captain Beefheart and other legendaries who made groundbreaking albums that flopped commercially.
"Neil Young even got sued for making uncommercial music," notes Dylan with a sardonic laugh.
Alluding to the manufacture of musical myths like "this monster called Britpop and all the subsequent bullshit that happened out of it", Dylan casts his mind back in history. "There was a time when the biggest bands in the world were also the best, like The Beatles and The Stones and stuff like that. But now it's pretty much a rule - though there are exceptions - that the biggest bands are the blandest."
Do Brian and Dylan find it a bit stressful or depressing that even though they're members of one of Dublin's more popular bands, they're not making a living from their music?
"I've had a series of shitty jobs," says Dylan, "and I'm looking for a job just now, if anyone out there wants to hire me. I'd be very happy if I could make money doing this, but I wouldn't assume it."
Some bands might be embarrassed calling their album "Tenderness", an emotional word with an implicit suggestion of vulnerability (though a band called "Pet Lamb" hardly come across as he-man material).
"Half the reason we wanted to use it," explains Brian, "was because it didn't fit in with people's opinion of us. People would be likely to expect us to come up with a hard-sounding guttery title."
"It's pretty antithetical to any idea that anybody might've had of Pet Lamb before," agrees Dylan. "Not that that would've had anything to do with us, because people assumed that we were these scuzzy rockers. There was always something more to us than that - not much, but some." n
* Pet Lamb's Tenderness is out now on blunt.