Brains

You could fit any history of Irish avant garde rock ‘n’ roll onto a website thumbnail: Roger Doyle, The Prunes nexus, Rollerskate Skinny, a few others. But now, inevitably, the subterranean currents of the Chicago post rock/Wire cadre are making themselves felt here, and to good effect.

A nine-piece ensemble, The Jimmy Cake utilise a dextrous but disciplined rhythm unit, expertly welded waves of accordion and clarinet, and the only Irish tenor sax to ever evoke De Kooning rather than Heineken. Tracks like ‘Elevenses’ mix found sounds with Mingus-meets-Godard dissonance, enhancing the trance but also the melody, the inherent riverality integral to freestyling (not noodling). I like it.

Song titles suggest millencholic art installations (‘This Used To Be The Future’, ‘Ignite The Doom Carriage’); the press release bandies about phrases like music concrete and namechecks Keiji Haino; the band run labels, organise festivals, write operas and have similarly surrealist friends in Cork (of course!) with names like Phillip K Dick.

Art-rock needn’t be a dirty coupling of words (or, while we’re using the lingo, juxtapositioning of recombinant text-bytes): it’s a sturdy lineage that goes from Lennon to Bowie to Ferry to Eno to Pulp to Gorrilaz. 90s trad-rock lost its edge when it got estranged from extraneous ideas. Irish pop got obnoxious ’cos it espoused Coke-sucking entrepreneurialism without the redeeming ostentatiousness and humour of hip-hop.

It’s a sad turn of events, but acts like The Frames, David Kitt, El Diablo, National Prayer Breakfast and now this lot constitute a musical version of the French Resistance, simply because they don’t pretend to be stupid or affect false humility while trying to lift your wallet. How fucked up is that?

On that note, the closing tune on Brains, ‘Hungry Ghosts’, with its Godspeed glockenspiel and Do Make Say Think dislocation, seems to prescribe a real rain to wash all the suited/booted scumbags off the streets. Roll on the economic crash and burn: bands such as The Jimmy Cake, like cockroaches, will multiply and inherit the earth.

Peter Murphy -