This is the Edgeweather

Edgeweather are going to surprise you. If you happen to stumble across a copy of their first single ‘Make A Mockery’, dripping, as it is, with plaintive vocals, and huge, stirring chords, you might imagine them to be battered veterans, pooling together years of collective disappointments and unrequited yearnings in the service of their art. Beards? Probably. Stories to tell? Must have.

Well, no.

Edgeweather are suspiciously young. Shane Megahey, Andy McClenaghan, Brian McFerran and Philip Mawhinney are all a polite twenty and have been friends since meeting at school. More a bunch of senior prefects than a rock band, they apologise whenever one speaks over another, and talk so quietly that at times the dictaphone is practically fuming.

Oh no, you may be thinking, not another shower of wan, blushing, indie boys – the garden-variety kind who mistake blustery production and facile lyrics for bogus ‘authenticity’.

There are many things that Belfast could do with at the moment; its own little Starsailor figures pretty far down the list.

Take comfort, then, because on the strength of their first release, Edgeweather could well be one of the most promising (and unselfconscious) rock bands the city has produced in years. Don’t expect any experimental beats, choppy buzzsaw guitars or stun gun on-stage charisma, the four-piece peddle something more modest and effectively melancholic. Which, it seems, is just how they like it.

“Everything happens naturally, and that’s how I hope we develop,” says guitarist Philip. “We’re all still fairly introverted. I mean, coming into this interview, as you’re going to find out, we haven’t prepared any humorous anecdotes; we’re just going to chat away boringly and hope that something happens. I think that we only really do things for ourselves. This whole thing has all come about pretty randomly. We’ve never had a huge plan; we just played around until we got to university and then we thought we might as well try to organise a few gigs. It’s only recently that we’ve started to take the audience into consideration. We’re still trying to come to terms with things like that. But it’s great.”

Hmm. Their debut EP doesn’t sound like the kind of record that falls together by accident. If anything, it has a sense of poise and self-confidence that should only come a lot further along the line. Influences buzz around wildly – the title track opens up like Copper Blue Sugar before lurching into the chorus with the kind of sideways faint that Dave Grohl would swap a drumstick for – and while you can hear nascent echoes of the likes of Echo And The Bunnymen, Coldplay, even Sigur Ros in the mix, you’re never left in any doubt that the authorship of these tunes rests in East Belfast. No mean feat. Not that the band themselves see it this way.

“It’s hard listening to it,” says vocalist Shane. “Especially the main single, because it was a really intense time. It was the first time we’d ever been in a proper studio, having to record the same song over and over again. It surprised me just how much the whole thing got to me. It sounds daft but it was like the song was just constantly going on around my head. It took me a while before I wanted to hear it again.”

With a few nationwide dates planned in support of the single, it seems that Shane is going to have to develop some resistance. At their most recent show in Belfast, enthusiastic punters were being turned away at the door. In keeping with the low-key Edgeweather M.O, though, expectations are being carefully managed.

“Originally we were supposed to be playing Dublin, Cork, Galway. Then it became Belfast, Bangor, Magherafelt…” laughs Shane.

“We’ve only ever played in Dublin once before and it was pretty shit, really. We played in this venue that had a noise limit. We were about two songs in and we got told that we had to turn the sound down because the neighbours were complaining.”

The next time they play, next door will have a glass to the wall, hoping that they crank things up.