Queasy Does It
Thanks to slacker pop anthems like ‘Get Sick’ and ‘Turn Away’, this Dublin foursome have squirmed and spazzed their way into many an indie lover’s heart, and all without the use of a single synth. Celina Murphy finds out how, in less than a year, Bouts have created one of Ireland’s favourite lo-fi live experiences.
Celina Murphy, 04 Sep 2012
Surely they’ve encountered writer’s block along the way?
“No, actually!” Bracken counters. “We need to take something, what’s good for that? Motilium? Creative songwriting Motilium, definitely. I’ll have two.”
Between the eponymous EP and follow-up 7” ‘Get Sick’/'We Tried’, the revived Bouts sound has been incredibly succinct, all hooky basslines, grungy guitars and skyscraping vocals.
“We didn’t really know what our sound was going to be,” Bracken observes, “and it surprised us. Suddenly when we heard ‘We Tried’, Shane (Cullen, producer extraordinaire) played it back to us in the studio and we were going, ‘What the hell? Is this our sound?’ We suddenly realised, ‘This is our sound!’ It was the first time we’d actually heard it properly and it was very odd.”
Sound firmly in place, the lads set about filming the video for ‘Turn Away’, a kind of platonic love-in with a karaoke twist.
Bracken remembers, “We rounded up lots of friends and piled into a karaoke booth at midnight. I’d love to say that it was storyboarded and that we’d planned the whole thing, but we winged it and were just lucky enough that we had enough good footage to stick together. That was a lot of fun.”
The video was inspired by a rehearsal when Bracken lost his voice, a common occurrence I’m guessing, with a roof-raising yelp like his.
“I don’t take singing lessons,” he admits. “Perhaps I should. I wouldn’t be the world’s greatest or most natural singer but I’m at a point now when I’m not shit and it’s working better for me. There are times when I think the band is really bad for me because I can’t sing what I’m supposed to sing, so there's a lot of delicate behaviour with lemon and honey.”
“Barry’s other approach is to stay out drinking ‘til five in the morning the day before a gig,” Flynn reveals, “and then go, ‘Jeez, that sounds pretty good for a lad who’s been drinking whiskey all night!’”
Sounds like Bouts have almost got everything under control, but will we be seeing the sort-of-debut-sort-of-follow-up album any time soon?
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