Pick up Mutiny Sounds, the debut album from Kill City Defectors, and you might mistake them for just another punky guitar band, full of energy but short on ideas. Well, Kill City Defectors have the energy alright, but they also bring a large dose of funk to the party.
Sitting in his local pub in Kildare, singer Iain McDonald agrees that the band may have to start explaining a few things. “That’s the good thing about putting this album out," he says, “we’re having to answer questions that we’d never even thought about. It’s a bit like starting again. Hopefully it will make sense when people listen to us and see us live”.
Mention the words funk and rock together and the image is often horrific, with memories of terrible sub-Chilis bands coming to the fore. Iain is keen to distance himself from the mob.
“We’d consider ourselves more electro with a big fat bass line and thumping bass drum. We listen to stuff like LCD Soundsystem. It’s a good crossover vibe.”.
Listen to their impressive album, though, and you can’t avoid the old cliché ‘there’s always been a dance element to our music’, although the singer is at pains to point out that this isn’t a contrived move.
He says: “A lot of stuff we’d be listening to would have a dance element but the great thing about the band is that we all have such different influences and Kill City Defectors is where those four circles cross. It is what it is, it’s very natural. We’ve got something of everything, even a prog rocker.”
What they do have in common with many of the bands who have taken inspiration from outside of the standard rock scene (including fellow Kildare residents and obvious soul mates Super Extra Bonus Party) is a desire to do things differently, to step outside of what would normally be expected of bands so early in their career.
“We’ve found ourselves in some really odd situations along the way,” say McDonald. “We’ve made three videos at this stage, which have got really heavy airplay on Channel 6. For ‘Messed Up’ we were running round a field dressed in white boiler suits getting chased by an orange blob. We found ourselves surrounded by bulls, who didn’t take too kindly to us being there. We’re surrounded by some great, creative people who help us out. We’re not trying to be different; it just engulfs our philosophy about music and everything that goes with it. It’s here we are, we do what just seems right.”