Rise and shine

When Hi.Rise won the last of a small clutch of Witnness Rising places Tom Dunne’s Pet Sounds were giving away earlier this year, a nation of indie hopefuls sighed with envy. Of course, a listen to the retrofuturist dance-pop swoonsters’ recent double A-side confirms that the several hundred text messagers who voted them onto the Café Stage knew what they were doing. ‘One Man’s Poison’ is all heart and all chorus: layers of irresistibly melodic girl-vocals sail blissfully over sampled thrums and sizzles while an ingeniously simple groove bumps away beneath. Flip-single ‘Love Rash’, meanwhile – all rueful trumpets, shivery 1970s atmospherics and Donna McCabe’s lonely-soul vocal – is a nod in the direction of Air circa Virgin Suicides or…

“I’ll set that record straight right now,” interrupts Andrew Rooney, guitarist and programmer, very definitely. “That song was written eight years ago. Before Air even formed.”

“But it was good to discover a band who were doing something we liked, and doing it really well,” says Donna generously.

“Air are just Serge Gainsbourg, anyway,” sniffs Andrew, who is not having any. Then he giggles. “They’re just stealin’ the same bits that we did.”

Four friends from (their term) “glorious Dublin suburbia”, they formed a band after years of dancing at raves and Northern Soul clubs. Hi.Rise first turned to the use of samplers and Minidisc to supply elements that their limited number of instruments and musicians could not.

“It was out of necessity, at first,” says Donna, “but we really started getting into it, and finding there was much more potential for discovering different sounds, playing completely different stuff. It helped us get into a another way of writing songs, as well.”

Their music apart, one of Hi.Rise’s lovable qualities is how visually realized they are. Their press photos are playful, studiously posed Blow Up-style 1960s homages: they could be stills taken on the kind of Youth Programming TV show soundstage Pete Townshend fucked up with his guitar at the end of ‘My Generation’. Their website, meanwhile, with its gallery of old Hi.Rise flyers, posters and laminates, is a headtrip of acid colours and bold block graphics, recalling the psych-pop era as well as its later stylistic reverberations (the mod revival; Warhol in the ‘80s).

“I think everybody in the band is a little eccentric,” says Donna thoughtfully. “But as a group of people, we’re very into bright, visual, eye-catching things – and, in a way, we’re really into tryin’ to get that ‘brightness’ into our music as well.”

Bright or no, Hi.Rise were once told by legendary label Acid Jazz that they were too ‘eclectic’. “They liked what we did,” says Donna. “But they said, ‘We can’t market you. There’s too much going on’.”

Undaunted – indeed, emboldened – Hi.Rise are seeking the assistance of the similarly eclectic for future projects. They’ve approached a few Irish producers to take to the mixing desk for their next session and are also “hopefully” going to have their next video done by animation mavericks Del 9. “Did you see their new one for Max Tundra?” Andrew asks, bug-eyed. “It is the best video by an Irish crew I have ever seen. It’s mad. I thought me video was broken.”