Monaghan’s rock and roll heritage extends to Big Tom and The Mainliners, Pat McCabe and little beyond. The Flaws – with a dash of Louth thrown into the mix – are waging a campaign to redress this imbalance – in pursuit of which they found themselves in Cork on the day their debut album, Achieving Vagueness was released.
And guess what: to my ears, at least, they are an uncanny amalgam of Interpol and The Killers. The sound is at times eerily synthetic, almost genetically modified, or grown in a lab in a petri dish somewhere in the Drumlin County. It’s akin to Cronenberg’s Brundlefly: it’s almost as if those two mega-bands stepped through one door of a teleportation device, and the Flaws emerged out the other.
Which, as you might expect, makes for occasional moments of superb, anthemic indie-rock. The brilliant ‘Sixteen’ with its gothy synths, reverb-shrouded guitars and propulsive energy is a majestic example, as is the languid, recherché new-wave elegance of ‘1981’. The slow-burning ‘Slow Dance’ has a dreamlike delicacy, with frontman’s Paul Finn’s cherubic features and keening voice matched by the magnetic poise of the music.
Worryingly though, these pieces of peerless pop are overshadowed on occasion by rather too predictable synth-rock pieces. The unremarkable ‘You And I’ and set closer ‘Out Tonight’ veer far too close to Brandon Flowers and Co to be categorised as anything other than tawdry knock-offs.
Maybe these somewhat cold-hearted, antiseptic numbers explain why the audience is cautious to embrace them. Despite the repeated invitations of a buoyant Finn to get up close, the crowd remains at a safe distance, never really committing to the band’s personal space. The result is that this doesn’t really feel like the celebratory occasion that would be appropriate. Audience fatigue could also be partly to blame – this was the seventh time the band played the city, a remarkable number considering they are still (relatively) in their infancy.
Which also gives hope for the future. At this moment, The Flaws’ appeal appears to be built around a core of killer tracks and an engaging frontman. But this experiment needs more work if the flaws are to be eliminated and The Flaws are to flourish. The encouraging thing is: it can be done.