Sound of the Shore

Irish rockers Kopek's debut album features in films American Reunion and Saw 3D and has already been on MTV's Jersey Shore. Ronan McGreevymeets a band who mean business

I T HAS BEEN a long road for Kopek, a longer road than most. It is 10 years since childhood friends from Dublin, drummer Shane Cooney and bassist Brad Kinsella, inspired by the grunge scene, put an advertisement in a magazine looking for a singer. They recruited Daniel Jordan from Ashbourne, Co Meath.

Four years later, they won a global battle of the bands competition in London, but it was another three years before they began to record their debut album, having signed a multi-album deal with Religion, a Dublin-based record company.

That album, White Collar Lies, was released in the United States in 2010 and is now about to be released at home.

It has been worth the wait: White Collar Lies holds the attention from start to finish. Producing an album that is sonically brutal in places and yet still accessible is a tough task but Kopek have completed it with self-assurance. It is made for radio, at least that section of radio which dares to stray from the stale menu of pop-pap, and it’s tailor-made for soundtracks.

Next month, Kopek’s song Bring It On Home will be featured in American Reunion, the much anticipated high-school-reunion sequel to the original American Pie. Love is Dead, the soon-to-be-released European single, features on the soundtrack to the movie Saw 3D. Six tracks from their debut album have been featured on Jersey Shore, on MTV, a station which has championed the band, and on Punk’d and The Challenge.

Kopek have elements of hard rock, heavy metal, grunge, punk and punk-pop.

There is a world of difference between the menacing bass lines of Love is Dead and the ethereal melodies of Floradian, their first Irish single: their music is hard to categorise which is how the band like it.

White Collar Lies was mixed and mastered by multi-Grammy winners Tom Lord-Alge and Ted Jensen and the band have eschewed a low-fi sound in favour of something that sounds, even on a cursory listen, like a hit record. The music is complemented by a couple of well-produced and racy promotional videos: it is clear that this band, and this record label, mean business.

It is also hard to argue with the band’s own contention that there is not a filler track on this record.

“We have been writing together for so long, there were a lot of songs to choose from,” explains dreadlocked lead singer and guitarist Daniel Jordan.

“We wanted to work on every song equally rather than have three songs and forget about the rest.” They spent six months in the US last year on tour with the mainstream metallers Hinder, building up a fan base. Their original drummer has since departed to be replaced by new drummer Eoin Ryan.

Phase two of their tilt at world domination starts with a few Irish gigs and the launch of the album at home with a European launch and tour to follow.

“As a band we never followed any trends,” says Jordan by way of explaining the hiatus between their formation and first album, “we just stuck to what we thought was good music. Over the last 10 years rock has got very stale. Big labels are looking for a Coldplay. The fact that we didn’t follow trends may have hindered us in that sense, but hopefully will pay off in the end.”

As its title suggests, the album has many contemporary preoccupations, from corporate greed to the emasculation of so much of today’s music, to drug addiction, though as the lyrics of the song Sub-Human attests, there are no easy villains and heroes.

“We’re supposed to be human, we’re supposed to have figured out the world.” Jordan explains: “Music has always been a medium of communication yet that seems to be forgotten about and people are singing about things that are trivial. I’m into singers who mean what they say and that’s what we are going for.”

They are scheduled to play on the last day of the Download Music Festival in June, an outing which is likely to give them priceless international exposure. It will be headlined by Black Sabbath in the first and only show of the European tour they have had to abandon as a result of guitarist Tony Iommi’s recent cancer diagnosis. Second on the bill are Soundgarden, big heroes of Kopek.

With a fair wind behind them, they could be very big indeed. You heard it here first.

yyy Kopek play Drogheda Fusion on April 8; The Academy 2, Dublin on April 13; and Download Music Festival, Donington Park, UK on June 10. Floridian is released on Friday, April 13. White Collar Lies is released on April 27