The Prawn Lawn

The Shanks: “The Prawn Lawn” (Rescue Records)

With eleven songs that have a total playing time of less than thirty minutes you might be forgiven for thinking that the Punk Rock revival has well and truly hit Ireland. However, as the title of the Shanks’ debut album should indicate – not to mention such madcap song names as ‘Cowgirl Fish (Do The Moonfish Tango)’ – this Cork outfit seem to be following in that quirky line of grand old British rock music eccentricity rooted in the late ’Sixties, but carried on in different ways by Five Go Down To The Sea and Nine Wassies From Bainne.

One problem with The Prawn Lawn is that too often songs such as ‘Time To Be Mine’ and ‘Hi-Hi (Don’t Do It)’ sound like snapshots of longer, looser, more meandering tunes – whereas, as successive masters of the under three minutes classic pop form show, each brief track should ideally be the epitome of brevity and completion, and sweetly autonomous.

Thankfully, this isn’t the whole story with The Prawn Lawn. ‘Babbling Brook’, due to its punchy and runalong, concatenating delivery gets it more or less right. It makes you want more. Meanwhile the buzzing, fuzzing chord work of ‘Angular Bells’ and the grey silicone moodiness of ‘No T-Bag’ suggest that there are better things to come from this energetic trio. The promise of these arias is equalled on the angst-ridden ‘Trickle Away’ but possibly even surpassed on the witty ‘In The Morning Thing’, which, clocking in at exactly four minutes long, is definitely the ‘epic’ on The Prawn Lawn.

There’s enough on here to merit your attention but when The Shanks become even terser and tenser then they’ll be more of a force to be reckoned with. They’re getting there, though. They just might need more time.

• Patrick Brennan