Queasy Does It

After two rapturously received mini-releases, one heart-melting karaoke-themed music video and a whole lot of gigs (40-odd in the last six months alone), everyone and their slacker pop-loving cousin is wondering when garage rock aficionados Bouts are going to deliver their debut album, unaware that... well, it actually already exists.

“It’s the album that nobody knows about,” bassist Niall Jackson says of 2010 LP New Ways Of Saying No, “but it’s kind of a different band now, really.”
“It’s almost like before you read a book, you have a prelude,” guitarist Barry Bracken adds.
Although the band’s first release was uploaded to Bandcamp almost two years ago, Bouts as we know them have only been around for nine months.
“Myself and Daniel (Flynn, drums) started off in the second half of 2010,” Bracken recalls, “and we actually didn’t play any gigs, we just rehearsed, got a bunch of songs together and recorded them and we put an album out for free and that’s what we did.”
“Barry thought we were going to do a thing where we all played different instruments than we normally play,” Flynn says, “but that totally fell through.”
“I was in a band before that,” Bracken explains, “so I think it was a case of just trying to rejuvenate it and mix it up a little bit and trying to get excited about playing again. The idea was that I'd play bass and go from there, really. We thought we’d release an album and then release another album and just be this studio thing, but it didn’t really turn out that way and it’s for the better.”
It certainly helped Bouts make an impression when their self-titled debut EP dropped in October of last year.
“A lot of people rush into getting songs out and you’re only on the first draft,” Bracken reflects. “You have to work through songs and get to a point where you go, ‘Yeah, this is better.’ Then you also have to know when to stop as well, ‘cause that can be a problem…”
“I’m not as much a bass-player as Barry’s sub-editor,” Jackson jokes. “He has an amazing knack of coming up with a song every hour.”
Surely they’ve encountered writer’s block along the way?
“No, actually!” Bracken counters. “We need to take something, what’s good for that? Motilium? Creative songwriting Motilium, definitely. I’ll have two.”
Between the eponymous EP and follow-up 7” ‘Get Sick’/'We Tried’, the revived Bouts sound has been incredibly succinct, all hooky basslines, grungy guitars and skyscraping vocals.
“We didn’t really know what our sound was going to be,” Bracken observes, “and it surprised us. Suddenly when we heard ‘We Tried’, Shane (Cullen, producer extraordinaire) played it back to us in the studio and we were going, ‘What the hell? Is this our sound?’ We suddenly realised, ‘This is our sound!’ It was the first time we’d actually heard it properly and it was very odd.”
Sound firmly in place, the lads set about filming the video for ‘Turn Away’, a kind of platonic love-in with a karaoke twist.
Bracken remembers, “We rounded up lots of friends and piled into a karaoke booth at midnight. I’d love to say that it was storyboarded and that we’d planned the whole thing, but we winged it and were just lucky enough that we had enough good footage to stick together. That was a lot of fun.”
The video was inspired by a rehearsal when Bracken lost his voice, a common occurrence I’m guessing, with a roof-raising yelp like his.
“I don’t take singing lessons,” he admits. “Perhaps I should. I wouldn’t be the world’s greatest or most natural singer but I’m at a point now when I’m not shit and it’s working better for me. There are times when I think the band is really bad for me because I can’t sing what I’m supposed to sing, so there's a lot of delicate behaviour with lemon and honey.”
“Barry’s other approach is to stay out drinking ‘til five in the morning the day before a gig,” Flynn reveals, “and then go, ‘Jeez, that sounds pretty good for a lad who’s been drinking whiskey all night!’”
Sounds like Bouts have almost got everything under control, but will we be seeing the sort-of-debut-sort-of-follow-up album any time soon?
“We’ve got a show planned for September when we’re just going to demo new material,” Bracken assures me, “but where we go or how we record them, we’re still trying to figure out. Speaking for everybody here, there will be, you know, 'the album' at some stage next year, but we haven’t set ourselves a release date. We’re just playing a lot of gigs at the moment… we want the easy life, basically!”
“I’m not quitting until someone carries my bass guitar!” Jackson announces.
“That’s what we want! Minions!” Bracken exclaims. “And maybe people to play our instruments while we’re off stage dong our thing. We’ll do a Kraftwerk on it, we’ll put up dummies and then we’ll be behind stage singing, you won’t even know we’re there. That’s the dream!

Bouts hit the road in August, playing Whelan’s, Dublin with Spies and Girl Band (1); Bourke’s, Limerick (2) and Castlepalooza (4).