Kiss and destroy

In a rundown former printing press on Dublin’s north side, near to Tolka Park, Delorentos are shooting the video for their latest single, ‘Eustace Street’. hotpress heads into a small, warehouse-type space in the building and finds the band’s singer, Kieran McGuinness, singing along to a playback of the track, whilst a group of approximately 30 fans, some of them in fancy dress, dance around him.

The director calls a halt to proceedings, and Kieran puts down his guitar and makes his way over to your correspondent. “I’ve had to learn some of the lyrics backwards for this one particular sequence in the video,” he explains. “It’s weird, when I sing the lyrics that way, they sound kind of like African tribal chanting.”
Kieran proceeds to sing me a snippet of the backwards lyrics, and he’s right, there is an undeniable African tinge to the sound. More disconcertingly, he sounds a lot like the Man From Another Place in Twin Peaks. Kieran and Nial Conlan, Delorentos’ affable bassist, retire with hotpress to a makeshift kitchen around the corner, where, over a table covered with props, drinks and food, we discuss the matter of Delorentos’ imminent debut album, In Love With Detail.
What’s the mood in the camp like? Expectant? Nervous?
“We’ve always been writing, releasing and playing, so this is just the next step,” states Kieran. “We’ve been dying to do it for a while, it took us a long time to get to the point where we were happy with all the songs. And now that we’ve achieved that, it’s quite exciting.”
“It’s definitely a buzz,” adds Nial. “It’s the big thing for a band, releasing an album, certainly a debut album. We’ve worked for a long time on these songs and now we really want to get them out there and see what people think.”
In terms of their sound, look and attitude, Delorentos fit neatly alongside the current wave of Irish indie bands like Director, The Immediate and Humanzi. But do they feel part of a scene?
“Because we come from Portrane, which is a long way out from the city centre, we’re pretty detached from it,” replies Nial. “The main thing is that because we didn’t have to pay for our own rehearsal space, we spent day after day, night after night, out there developing our own sound.
“Our rehearsal space is an interesting spot, actually. Across the road there’s a house that used to be George Harrison’s holiday home. And nearby is the place that Bono was baptised when he was in the prayer group Shalom.”
“The rehearsal space is also where we developed our musical form of OCD,” continues Kieran. “We spend a lot of time angsting over the songs, which is why the record is called In Love With Detail. We sit there going, ‘Does that scan? Is that an interesting part? Is that too long?’ Then when we play the songs live, we learn more about them.
“You figure things out, like, ‘That part dragged, maybe we should edit it down, maybe we should repeat a chorus’ – that kind of thing. Also, when you play a live set, you occasionally think, ‘Maybe we need something more up to go here’. That’s the way the album works too, there’s light and dark, because that’s the way life is.”
Some of the tracks on In Love With Detail have an angular quality similar to post-punk influenced bands like Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. Was that style of music a reference point for the band when they were recording the album?
“People have said that to us,” nods Kieran. “But I’d never listened to a Franz Ferdinand album before! At the end of the recording, Gareth Mannix, who produced the album, brought in one of their records and played it for us. People were already mentioning the similarities, but they’d never been a band I was into, so it’s kind of funny.”
“We have such disparate influences,” says Nial. “We wouldn’t agree on any three or four bands between us, we all listen to very different things. The album probably has a nod to that style of music, but it’s just one aspect among many other things. Although we did support Gang Of Four in December, who I suppose are the godfathers of that particular genre.
“They were very hyped up before they went on,” remembers Kieran. “Like they’d been drinking all day (laughs). Jon King has this spot in the concert where he beats the hell out of a microwave with a baseball bat. Andy Gill was the same, at one point he said, ‘Somewhere in this crowd tonight is the next James Joyce!’ And there was a kind of collective groan. But they can be a pretty powerful live act, they’re very aggressive.”
Gang Of Four are not the only underground legends Delorentos have encountered over the past few years. A trip to Chicago afforded Kieran and Nial the opportunity to meet Steve Albini, known for his work on records by acts like Nirvana, The Pixies and PJ Harvey.
“We posed as journalists from an Irish fanzine,” reflects Kieran. “I was over visiting Nial, who was staying in Chicago for a few months. So we looked up his studio, Electrical Audio, in the phonebook and went down there. I knocked on the door of this attorney’s office across the road and said, ‘Can I use your phone?’ They let me in and I rang the studio from the head attorney guy’s phone. Steve Albini answered and said we could come over.
“He knew well we weren’t journalists,” says Nial. “I was recording on a mini-disc through headphones and Kieran was pretending to take notes. We asked him about working with The Pixies, but he didn’t seem to be that big a fan. He then took us on a tour of the studio, and it was a bit odd because all the engineers were wearing boiler suits with their initials on them. I don’t know if you’ve seen pictures of Abbey Road, but Electrical Audio looks a bit like it, with the spiral staircase and open chamber.
“And they use this adobe brick, which they import from Mexico, which either absorbs the sound or else creates some kind of reverb effect. The other thing that stuck in my head was that Steve Albini was drinking Coke. You kind of expect him to be drinking, I don’t know, Fair Trade Cola or something!”
Delorentos recently played the SXSW festival in Texas. How did the event go for them?
“It was incredible, the best fun we’ve had in a while,” replies Kieran. “The whole atmosphere is very laid back and positive. You don’t see much security around the place, but the event is incredibly well run. In fact, I think the only time we saw any police was when we started a football game in the busiest street in Austin!
“It started out with just the four of us, and we ended up with about a hundred people. There were people videoing it and everything, and other bands started to join in, we could have been playing football with anybody. We were kind of standing there going, ‘Well, how did this happen?’ Then the police came along and Ross, our drummer, tried to dribble around an officer. That was the end of it.”
“They have guns over there,” says Nial, gravely. “Here you’d probably be a bit cheekier.”
Kieran admits that the band felt considerable pressure before their performance at the festival.
“We were very nervous,” he acknowledges. “A lot of people had put time into getting us over, and we’d saved up ourselves, so we needed to deliver. We wanted to play a good gig and entertain people, not just get pissed and knock out any old crap.”
“We’d already taken that approach in New York,” says Nial. “The crowd response was ‘What the hell was that!’ That was the first night of the Craic Festival (shakes head).”
“Yeah, we went over with a pipe and a little spoon,” laughs Kieran. “But after that first gig we thought, ‘Maybe we should take this a little more seriously!’ And the next two shows in New York were really good. Then at SXSW we played with a lot of energy and people really responded to it. After a couple of songs we realised we were playing in a window off to the side. There was a huge number of people outside, and we started kind of playing to them, and they made a lot of noise and the crowd got even bigger.”
Such moments are a big part of what keeps Delorentos motivated, according to Kieran.
“That was a really good feeling,” he says. “Every now and again you get an occasion like that, something that sends a shiver up your spine. Playing to 5,000 people we didn’t expect at Oxegen was like that. There are just things that happen occasionally that make you think, ‘You’re doing this correctly.’”
“And some of the experiences you get out of it are fantastic,” concludes Nial. “Sure, where else would you be playing a song backwards with a bunch of people jumping around?”
In Love With Detail is released on Cottage on April 20. Delorentos play the Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin on April 26.