Jimmy riddle

Even though they have been in existence in their current guise for barely over a year, The Jimmy Cake have already seduced Dublin gig-goers with their marvelous melange of infectious melody and brain-pummeling noise, packing out the capital’s larger medium sized venues in the process.

In the same short time frame, these industrious types have also released a perfectly realized debut album Brains, one of the fastest selling Irish independent albums Tower Records have ever handled, and a split 7” on the Road Relish singles series.

Their wide expanse of instrumentation could be described as ‘avant garde’ or ‘experimental’, but this tends to overlook the direct euphoric power of their live show which transcends the usual tedium of what is often called art-rock.

The line-up features various active and dormant members of David Kitt’s band, Thinker Org, Dead Plants, Chokchai 3k Battery, Rae and Luc and the Platelets. In true ensemble fashion, the personnel also included individuals involved in the electronic label Front End Synthetics and the composers of the operas Obegon and Neshika – both of which were hits at last year’s Fringe Festival – plus members of The Whispering Gallery arts group.

The Cake is a loose continuation of the seven-piece ensemble Das Madman who last played together in July 1999 with David Kitt in the Funnel, an engagement which also happened to be one of the sorely missed venue’s last ever gigs.

“It then became a thing we all talked about for a year, the whole question of whether or not we’d like to rehearse again,” explains Simon O’Connor, guitarist and glockenspiel player with the Cake. “Someone then found a Das Madman fan page on the web which we had no knowledge of. It was really cute and simple – just a few pages of text files about us, but it got us a bit excited again. We were asked us if we would reform and play a gig so we agreed and called ourselves The Jimmy Cake. We wrote the whole set in two weeks in my flat, and that set became the majority of the album.”

Simon describes the activities of Das Madmen as “terminally unrecordable”. Bass player Dip reflects on the sudden burst of newly-found proficency.

“It’s gas because we were together as Das Madman for three years and we only went into the studio twice. Once we were so drunk, we couldn’t record anything. We released nothing. Then we were The Jimmy Cake for four months. We went into the studio and essentially recorded our first album in the space of a weekend.

“We do tend to drop a lot of material,” continues Simon. “Unlike Das Madman, we are able to write stuff really quickly because the orchestration of the band is so good. All the instruments are in all the right places and there is a really even spread so we can do a huge amount with it. There is so many pairings you can have between the accordion, the clarinet and the tenor sax – three instruments that are really quite close together.”

Dip sees the core of the Jimmy Cake’s original sound originating from splicing together a traditional and progressive line up. “I think it is seriously important that you can have a group that is essentially two guitars, bass and drums - but the whole melody line is given to you by five other separate instruments. We can be as shambolic as we like but this melody carries it.

“That is quite important to the music because even though it is instrumental, it is not instumental in the post-rock sense like Tortoise, Godpeed You Black Emperor! or Mogwai because it is so melody driven. Unlike a lot of instrumental music, you can hum along to it. I got this email from Australia and there is just one line that I think encapsulates it perfectly: ‘You show an extraordinary sense of control over the passage of time. A moment that is held still is suspended and then released with a rush’. That is kind of what we were after.”

In addition to producing some of the most daring yet entertaining sounds around, the Cake have been the subject of some gutteral toilet humour in a very literal sense, as a jimmy cake is also a term applied to those luridly coloured disinfectants found in urinals.

“It was a complete chance connection of words,” insists Simon. “We named our last band really badly so I supppose it was keeping in tradition to name the next one really badly. Rory made it up and everyone checked it out on the net and found loads of recipes. It’s an apple tart in Sweden and it’s a chocolate cake in America. Then they call hundreds & thousands ‘chocolate jimmys’. Steve Fanagan and Richie Egan were the first people to say: ‘They are the things you put in bogs aren’t they?’. Then it spread around that we called ourselves after the yokes you find in loos.” “But it ain’t so,” confirms Dip.

Brown adds; “If so we would have called ourselves Anti-Splash Mat”.

Brains is out now on Pilatus records. www.thejimmycake.com