Hot Press First Cuts Gig at the Wexford Arts Centre

Supported By Hot Press and Beat FM to highlight emerging local talent, the second in the First Cuts series saw Odi and former Salt House man Niall Colfer supporting local heroes Chaplin.
Odi is a homegrown female singer now domiciled in Leeds, who impressed with her recent single ‘Crawl’. Her appealing voice recalls Beth Orton, Sheryl Crow, Judy Collins and Melanie at various times, and a precociously confident and unaffected stage persona makes for frill-free listening. Her sidekick Dave adds perfunctory guitar, vocals and harmonica: Odi was particularly impressive on ‘You Win But You Lose’, the wistful ‘What You Deserve’ and ‘New York’. Definitely one to watch, if she can crawl from the morass of female singer-songwriters doing similar things.
Despite this being his first outing with a new drummer and bassist, Niall Colfer worked hard to stir the crowd, doing so splendidly on songs like ‘Stole The Day’ and his classy single ‘After All That Happened’. ‘Ho-Hummin’ floated along quite merrily, and the band effortlessly shifted up the gears for ‘Turn A Blind Eye’. ‘Stole The Day’ was another winner. Colfer has a winning way with quality pop-rock songs that avoid the mawkish introspection of his dull peers.
Chaplin are a five-piece who bring a tantalising air of the unexpected to every song, stretching the limits of the basic guitars-and-drums line-up to breaking point. Within the confines of one song, they can range with effortless ease from prog-rock to country-folk and full-on mainstream rock. A song can start off just so, but, as in ‘Maybe In June’ end in incendiary squalls of feedback or, like ‘Swings and Roundabouts’, evolve into a climactic percussion orgy. ‘Till It’s Gone’ is silkily ethereal, ‘Puppeteers’ and the hillbilly-ish ‘The Story Goes’ are little short of brilliant, while Ian Doyle’s expressively fragile voice is backed by layers of harmonies for ‘Movin On’. Chaplin use back-projections to turn their performance into a dynamic show, and the sound in the hands of WAC soundman Ollie Dempsey was impeccable throughout. Roll on gig number 3 on 21 September.