Stoat
The Sugar Club, Dublin, 5 August 2005
Review Snapshot:
A gig 18 years in the making. Cluas catches up with an old friend as it
drops in to the Sugar Club which is playing host to the launch of Stoat's debut
album "Future Come And Get Me". The oddball indie-poppers are in fine form
playing a selection of songs from the album as well as rocked-up takes on some
of your childhood favourites.
The CLUAS Verdict? 6.5 out of 10
Full review:
The members of Stoat have been making music together for the best part
of 2 decades but despite this I've managed to live my entire life thus far
without hearing anything that they've produced. Part of it is probably down to
my own laziness but it could also be due to the band's infrequent live schedule
over the past couple of years and the fact that their recorded output has
amounted to 5 singles and an unreleased E.P...
Nonetheless the band is not without their fans, Cluas founder and editor Eoghan
O'Neill being amongst them. In fact, the early history of this site is closely
tied to Stoat, they were one of the first bands reviewed hereway back in 1999 and they headlined thefirst gig Cluas ever organised in December of that
year. Since then however mentions of Stoat in this little corner of the web have
been non-existent so when the band announced that they were finally getting
around to releasing their debut record, "Future Come And Get Me", our intrepid
leader was adamant that we cover it and urged that someone go and review their
album launch. Obviously that someone wound up being yours truly. Although I must
admit feeling some anxiety about it as they had been described to me as "One
of the more intriguing offerings on the local scene," such phrases instantly
conjures up frightening images off weird, self-indulgent music that lends itself
more to chin-stroking than toe-tapping.
Boy was I wrong, intriguing Stoat may be but their performance is a million
miles away from being self-indulgent and difficult. Instead it is in fact
possibly the most fun you can have in a Dublin venue this side ofa Neosupervital gig. Opening with a rocked-up
version of "Que Sera Sera" and finishing with a version of "The Teddybears
Picnic" which quickly segued into a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna
Have Fun" Stoat managed to infuse everything they played with a sense of fun and
the sheer joy they got from just playing this gig (and it's taken them 18 years
to get to this point, who can blame them?) was both obvious and infectious.
It's extremely hard to describe what Stoat's music is like because they're one
of the most bizarrely diverse sounding bands I've ever come across. Ostensibly
they're an indie-pop outfit (albeit one with a somewhat twisted view of the
world) but that label is nowhere near far reaching enough to accurately describe
them. "Oh Happy Day" and "Nobody In Heaven" fit most snugly into that particular
pigeonhole and are fine examples of the style but beyond that things start to go
awry.
"The Saltee Tango" is a sea shanty set to a military drum beat, "Acunamanacana"
fuses ska vocals with various styles of indie guitar and a vaguely metalish
bassline, and "59 Dame Street", with the machine gun like spoken-word delivery
of its lyrics sees vocalist and guitarist John Hearne borrow a couple of ideas
from Dave Couse to great effect. And then
there's the 5-person male voice chorus that sounds more like a drunken
sing-along then a group of backing vocalists. Yes it's quirky, in fact it
occasionally even surpasses quirk and ventures into the realms of "strange" but
when it works, and that's most of the time, it's wonderful.
Stoat are a good band but it's easy to see why their career has taken the path
it has, in a world that demands groups that can be easily described and lumped
in with a bunch of similar sounding acts they defy that convention. Their sound
is too inconsistent for them to be classified in any of your standard indie
sub-genres and, eccentric moments aside, they aren't out there enough to be
classified as "weird". But they are a band that deserves to be heard and
hopefully "Future Come And Get Me" (which in an admittedly weak year for Irish
records is the best Irish album that I can recall being released in 2005) will
bring them to a wider audience because, as great as the likes ofRadiohead,Interpol andThe Smiths are, you sometimes need to hear
music that just makes you want to smile.
Ian Wright
Check out a review of Stoat's EP 'Oh Happy Day'
Check out a review of Stoat live back in 1999.
