Home Truths

Pony Club is the latest moniker for the musical vision of Mark Cullen, the one-time Bawl frontman and Fixed Star. He may have grown up in the Northside Dublin suburb of Finglas, but Cullen was raised on a diet of guitar pop from across the Irish Sea, which forms the basis for most of these kitchen sink vignettes of ordinary disfunctional family life.

In fact, sometimes this plays out like a Mike Leigh script put to music, such is the scything truth contained in simple, everyday sentences. As he sings on album opener, ‘Fuck With My Heart’, “Our fights start with you coming home/I’m content on my own…Yes there’s somebody else/Yes it’s someone you know”. Or the caustic, claustrophobic sonic assault of ‘CCTV’, where Cullen cuts an acerbic swathe through consumerism and classism in one fell sweep of his pen, “watching Hilfiger glamourise violence in every run-down satellite highrise”.

Cullen counterbalances his acidic attacks with moments of pin-dropping, almost embarrassing tenderness, like the soul-searching of ‘Stop’, the overwhelming sense of loss that surrounds ‘Home Is So Sad’ or the confessional ‘The Thing About Men’, an almost-dub masterpiece detailing the ongoing battle between the single sexes. ‘Happy Families’ is similarly magnificent, detailing the gradual erosion of a relationship with an almost microscopic view of the pain created.

Sometimes, however, Cullen’s rage can be heavy-handed and over-cynical, as on ‘Millions Like Us’ or ‘Flakey Wife’, where he piles on the misery in layers, as he details in-home violence, drug addiction, and the drudgery of everyday life. Domestic bliss this certainly ain’t.

In the main, these are finely crafted songs that speak from the heart, but they are unlikely to be everybody’s cup of arsenic. I fear the pervading sense of hopelessness and gloom may be too cloying for the majority of listeners. Not recommended for Shania Twain fans, then.