Strange Boats - Gnome

Tuam’s latest musical export may take their name from a Samuel Beckett poem, but there the pretention ends, as the quartet of Darragh O’Dea (vocals, guitar), Rory Donnellan (guitar, vocals), Richie McDonagh (bass) and Davy Flats (drums) trade in the kind of meat-and-two-veg pub rock that’s impossible to hate, but pretty hard to really fall for.
It all starts promisingly, with ‘Sugar Delph’, where a catchy guitar intro and hand claps pave the way for an infectious sub-two minutes of pop-rock that calls to mind Northern folk-punkers Watercress at their best. Recent single ‘Boys Walk Faster Than Girls’ is storming punk pop with a big shouty chorus, as if The Sawdoctors had grown up with Blink 182 and Green Day on the bus radio.
Pick of the bunch, ‘Teenage Love Convention’ is a charming, humorous look back at those knock-kneed, dry-mouthed first moments of adolescent passion, including kissing “like washing machines”. Elsewhere, ‘Tall Street Lights’ drips just the right amount of melancholy and the bittersweet ‘Sweet Onions’ benefits from Sarah Lynch’s beguiling violin, although the hidden track at the end, featuring Sawdoctor Leo Moran reciting Beckett’s poem over a cacophony of sea shanties, would definitely have been better left in the studio where it was conceived.
Strange Boats aren’t going to win any awards for songwriting: some of their couplets come straight from the Noel Gallagher Nursery School of Rhyme, as is particularly evident on the slower ‘My Baby’ or ‘Ballad Of A Night Shift Nurse’, although the uptempo ‘Slow Burner’ is the worst culprit by far: “Don’t worry old man, I won’t harm your daughter/ Just take her out for a cool glass of water”. If you can get over that, however, when it comes to big, drunken shoutalongs like ‘Shotgun Wedding’ and ‘Nice To Be Along’, they score highly and often. File under drunken fun, with a small ‘f’.

Key Track: 'Teenage Love Convention'