The Floors of Perception

IF PEDIGREE alone paid the rent, The Floors' mastermind David Donohue would be a made man. Always ten years ahead of his time, this Carlow-born film-maker, musician, songwriter and alternative entrepreneur first made his mark in 1989 with Put Blood In The Music, an excellent documentary study of a downtown New York downtown scene that included John Zorn and Sonic Youth. Since then, in one medium or another, he's collaborated with the likes of The Youth's Lee Renaldo, Lydia Lunch, Maria McKee, Jim Sheridan and U2. For his enterprise and work ethic alone, the man deserves a sizable paragraph in any potted history of Ireland's peripheral visionaries.

This third album continues the tradition of picking the brains of the great and good: PJ Harvey collaborator and 16 Horsepower producer John Parish co-writes and produces the pulling-fingernails study of obsession that is 'Desire Will Leave Me Homeless', while Katell Keineg fulfils a similar role on 'Love Song To My Guru', a robust Go-Betweens-go-country dirge.

Morphine Watch is the kind of record you root for, while acknowledging that there are definite flaws in the construction. When Donohue's good he's great - check out the title track, a crypto narco-epileptic lyric delivered in a Lou drawl over a sleazy uptown shuffle. "I think we're losing him," a female Asian voice announces over the tune's conclusion, except it sounds like Donohue wants to get lost, Major Tom- style, in the wide blue yonder.

That's just for starters. Elsewhere, the melancholic grandeur of 'Slowly When She Moves' recalls the very finest Triffids, 'Are You Running With Me Jesus?' puts no-wave poetry through Tricky-ish psychoanalysis, and 'Midnight Call' is as downbeat as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.

Mind you, there are rather daft episodes where the composer ends on the wrong side of whimsy. 'She's A God' cuts a wry line through Pavement and Beck, but comes a cropper on the ludicrous chorus, while the Buddy Holly-on-methamphetamine strangeness of 'So Cruel' might best have been left on the cutting room floor.

Nevertheless, Donohue has wisely kept the album brief (nine tracks in 32 minutes), but packed with ideas. The arrangements are spare and sly (especially the wicked Coltrane-plays-Cohen snatch of 'My Favourite Things' on the little death of 'The Last 16 Hours'), and Pat Dunne's crisp production job packs a gratifying punch. Therefore, consider Morphine Watch another jagged entry in the diary of one of the country's most prominent madmen.