Mine

THE GLEE CLUB: “Mine” (4AD)

The global success of Sinead and Dolores has probably made it that bit more difficult for any other female-fronted Irish group to avoid unflattering comparison with our two feminine pioneers. However, on the evidence of Mine, The Glee Club, a Galway band, based in London, featuring Joanne (ex-of- Swinging Swine) at the vocal helm, can hold their heads high and proclaim that their chanteuse has the ability to carve her own particularly credible niche.

A melancholic strain runs throughout, even if the last two tracks of the eleven, ‘Take You There’ and ‘Icy Blue’ are almost catchily sing-alongable. The former is the more uplifting and immediately alluring of the closing pop couplet. ‘Icy Blue’, meanwhile, manages to summarise the recurrent theme of water that underscores many of the numbers and nowhere better nor more obliquely than on ‘We Do Believe’ which takes a clinically pragmatic-to-nihilistic view of the plague of emigration as Joanne dolorously chants “The water’s high/Just like the hopes/Of us all in days gone by.” The violin accompanies her, tearfully faithful to the dirge-like rhythm which the band intentionally plod out.

In fact, besides Joanne’s existential singing, the strings, which are sometimes fatalistically melodic (à la Michael Nyman and his scores for Peter Greenaway’s movies), are one of the crucial factors that hauls Mine from out of the whirlpools of ordinariness. Witness the enriching effect of the bow on the beautifully sublime and haunting ‘Drives You Away’, which again utilises the symbol of water and plays upon its dual function as both a source of life and also a potential drowning pool.

‘Remember The Years’, is an epic in scope and ambition obliquely concerned with colonialism: it profiles a highly histrionic and John Cale-esque violin that rambles wildly and permissively across another murderously mournful beat.

Strange as it seems, though, the most successful numbers are in many ways also the simplest. ‘Bad Child Dolly’ offers a cheeky chastisement of the sort of individual who recklessly puts people’s safety at risk because of a childish need for attention. And ‘Need’ expresses a very maturely maternal wish that yet another wayward young man might get his act together and realise that there ain’t much more to life than finding the right person to love, both seem to define the element in which Joanne is happiest to paddle about.

At times one worries that The Glee Club tread dangerously near the fathomless eddies of musical unfashionability. They are, however, on 4AD, a label which has made a name for steering bands whose essential ethos is to stay afloat on the lone raft of their own sensibility.

Either way, for the time being Joanne and her Glee Club can feel justifiably buoyant.

• Patrick Brennan