Exile On Dame Street

Cool title. Cool cover too, modelling the kind of drunk-at-an-Irish-wedding look last sported by The Pogues circa 1985.

$1000 Wedding are a loose affiliation of players drawn from a deep pool of Dublin barroom philosophers (Stars Of Heaven, The Sewing Room) playing songs by Sean A. McDermott in a wilfully sloppy style. These hangdog madrigals are delivered for the most part by Mary Whelan, an unfussy chanteuse who sounds like she’s perpetually shambling from a flea-ridden motel after a night spent trying to wring out her pickled heart into some urban cowboy’s snoring mouth. The scene is not a million miles from El Diablo meets the Jubilee Allstars in the losers’ lounge of the Sacred Heart Hotel, County Limbo. Contrived? Who cares.

They may well have titled it Ten Ways To Numb Your Innards With Drink. McDermott has a cute way with a gallows-humoured country couplet (“Jesus and Jack Daniels are my constant companions”) while the band creak, sway and stagger like a septuagenarian C&W incarnation of The Replacements. Highlights include the moist-eyed ‘On The Beach’, an unlisted, eerie ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, and a remake of Stephen Ryan’s nugget ‘Paradise Of Lies’ tackled like The Stones on ‘Factory Girl’ – skeletal trap kit, fiddles, mandolins and a ball of malt on the side.

$1000 Wedding reiterate what the country ‘n’ Irish acts have known for years – a redneck is a redneck is a redneck, whether in Tennessee or Tallaght, hence unhealthy fixations with hand-me-down religion, strong libation and absent sweethearts.

No frills, lo-fi, stumblebum fun.