Death of the naturalists

Could Boa Morte be the most humble band of all time? Here’s Cormac Gahan, one of two singer/songwriters behind Cork’s (and possibly Ireland’s) most elusive musical prospect, explaining his music’s appeal. “It’s not difficult to listen to, I suppose,” he suggests, utterly awkwardly. “But it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, at the same time.”

These days, Boa Morte needn’t sing their own praises, however: everyone else is doing it for them. After years of cult adoration in the People’s Republic playing rare Lobby gigs to a tiny, enthralled fanbase, and following a legal wrangle with a US imprint which benched them for an additional year, their debut album has emerged internationally to uniformly ecstatic praise and enthusiasm. (“Really?” says Cormac, characteristically slightly panicked at this news. “Oh wow. Jeez, I didn’t realise it was reaching the album reviews stage yet.”)

Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside, then, is exactly as self-effacing and introverted an LP as you would imagine it to be, with a wintry, outdoorsy, alone-but-not-lonesome kind of beauty, and a profound, almost snowbound stillness. It’s an album of unfathomable humility: all carefully finger-plucked guitars, quietly fizzing drums, the occasional mute companionship of a cello or (multi-instrumentalist Diarmuid Mac Diarmada on) oboe, and – above all – the kind of hangdog, bass-register murmurings-to-self from Cormac (and co-singer Paul Ruxton) that make Red House Painters’ Mark Kozelek seem a bit of an exhibitionist.

The album’s essential rural-ness, in particular, is a delight.

“Well, we’re all quite rural, really,” agrees Cormac. “Three of us live in the city, but none of us are from the city. We all have day jobs or whatever. But we’re not really city people at heart.”

So spare, so quiet: this kind of music, I imagine, must be difficult to play live. When it works, it’s gorgeous; when it doesn’t, it must be terrifying to get through.

“Oh, definitely, yeah. There’s a lot to be said for a distortion pedal,” reckons Paul. “In that you can nearly hide behind it. Whereas the quieter it is, the harder it is to get across.”

“Actually, we all try to hide when we go onstage,” Cormac remarks. “But unfortunately somebody has to go in the middle.”

Onstage bashfulness or no, and thanks to Shoeshine label boss (and Teenage Fanclub drummer) Francis MacDonald, it has finally come time to face the world outside – namely, via their first-ever trip away from home, a UK tour this month with labelmates The Beauty Shop and Major Matt Mason. It’ll be interesting to watch what results: their live dates thus far have apparently been (to hear it from Corkonian witnesses) nights of slow-burning, time-stopping, exceptional beauty.

Why, I ask Cormac, do Boa Morte have this effect on people?

“I dunno. Do we? Ooh, I dunno…” (breaks into high-pitched titters of laughter) “But feel free to print that if you want.”