When listening to new bands or albums I sometimes find myself wondering if I would see the band live. Not living in a particularly thriving live band community but enjoying live bands I am a little envious of people who live in a place where live music easily accessed. I suppose it makes up part of my view as to whether or not I like a band or artist too. So, would I go to see Desert Hearts on the basis of this album? Yes. I love the vocals and the slightly dark lyrics that are not full of emo angst but have a realism to them that drew me in.
The album cover is black and foreboding but it is able to stay away from the clichés that usually arrive with such a look. Some of the tracks yell “woe is me” (such as
Goodbye To Everything) and taken out of context of the album as a whole listeners may wonder if this is just another example of a group who want to lament about how bad the world has treated them and how sad losing love is. However, this is not the whole story and, as with life, whilst this album is complicated and confused. The tracks are all written, bar D Moon Pilot, by vocalist and guitarist Charley Mooney. This album explores Mooney’s search for perfection and ends in the realisation that there is no such thing,
The tracks are a real mixture of slow soft music with quiet lyrics adding choirs and cellos to hard guitars and songs building to bloodied crescendos. This leaves an album that is not easily defined and that refuses to smoothly go from one song to the next so that the listener is left a little baffled by what is going on, but that is a quality I love in this album. Too many times we see albums that are easy and which flow all too simply but occasionally an album will refuse to be left on in the background and it will demand attention,
Hotsy Totsy Nagaski is one such album. The title track tells us “forget nothing, I remember it all. Have another drink, we could have it all”. I think most people have felt this from time to time.
This is the band's second album. It is of no surprise when you listen to the tracks that they have supported Snow Patrol as there is some similarity between this album and
Songs For Polar Bears, which was arguably Snow Patrol’s best album to date. The band have a strong live following and if their live sound is anything as good as the album suggests, they would be worth looking out.
Ireland has a history of producing great lyricists and Charley Mooney continues this tradition. Added to this, Roisin Stewart on bass and Chris Heaney on drums complete this trio. The album dark album cover was, for me, a mistake. I think seeing black cover is suggestive of another generic rock album that has been done before or worse still an emo-style 45 minutes of saying how terrible life is, how the singer wishes he were dead as his love has left him and is ultimately boring. Don’t let the cover fool you though, this album is none of these things. The lyrics are dark at times and in
Gravitas Mooney sings of being out of this world before he is 30 but Mooney is not one dimensional and his lyrics are more a snap shot of a time than a comment that he doesn’t want to be a part of this world.
This second album has taken some time to arrive but the time the band have taken to complete this project has been worth it. Their MySpace site has 4 songs from the album to sample
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm...endID=26454285 and the album is available through Simbiotic for £6.99 at
http://tiga.simbioticstore.com/index...&item_id=11855
