Cardinals have been championed by Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC and praised in the UK press as thrilling flag‑bearers for the Cork indie scene.
With that sort of hype you might expect their long‑awaited debut album to be a boundary‑shattering bolt from the blue – the thrilling sound of the new. Actually, it’s more the moderately interesting sound of the overly familiar: a laid‑back listen that wears its debt to The Pogues, Oasis and Van Morrison with a pride that now and then verges on the unseemly.
How surprising that the future of Irish rock should be so beholden to its past.
But the real lesson of these 10 tracks is that new ideas aren’t necessarily all they’re cracked up to be. There’s no blue‑sky thinking here, nothing edgy or rebellious. Rather than trying too hard, this is a record that mooches around with its hands in its pockets and that reads both as a travelogue through the recesses of the emotional life of Euan Manning, the band’s singer, and as a gritty love letter to Cork.
READ MORE
You can almost reach out and touch the grey cloudscapes, the poetic drizzle, the cityscape framed both by the futuristic gleam of the Elysian skyscraper and by the broken‑tooth hinterland of the crumbling town centre.
Beneath that painterly surface swirls a fair amount of emotional depth. Cardinals’ diaristic songwriting brims with dark wit and despair and also ticks off a checklist of romantic misfires by Manning, whose personal life, judging by his lyrics at least, is an ever‑unfolding disaster.
“’Cause my legs are blown to bits / And I always feel shit,” he says on Big Empty Heart, an exuberantly miserable chronicling of falling out of love that makes twentysomething heartache sound like a mid‑tier action movie.
But the real innovation embraced by the band, whose core members met at school in Kinsale, is a willingness to take their time. In an age when artists are too often in a rush to blow the listener away, these by turns stormy and melancholic songs have a beautifully patient quality.
Is it reaching to suggest that the experience of growing up in view of the slow, sad swell of Kinsale Harbour has trickled down into the music? Perhaps – yet there’s a quietly stormy quality to these tunes that evokes images of cascading seas, lonely gulls and fish suppers from Dinos down at the pier.
That Cardinals are in no hurry is made clear from the very start of the opening number, She Makes Me Real, which begins as a blustering pastiche of The Pogues’ A Pair of Brown Eyes only to morph into a satisfyingly gnarly take on 1990 postrock and then swerve into a cascade of REM-style guitars.
The gentle cacophony continues on St Agnes (named after Harry Clarke’s stained‑glass Eve of St Agnes), which spotlights Manning’s bruised vocals – he sounds as if he’s thinking about nipping off for a quick sob – only to swerve into Libertines‑style landfill indie.
Some of the album’s best songs appear to soundtrack Manning’s experience of ambling around Cork, inhaling the gloom and wondering if there’s anything more to life. He talks about walking about on George’s Quay and staring at City Hall on Barbed Wire, while the Radiohead‑esque The Burning of Cork uses a 1920 black-and-tan campaign of arson in the city as a metaphor for spiritual torment. It’s as if Thom Yorke woke up and found himself playing the lead in The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
Cardinals aren’t interested in the shock of the new: their songs are lullabies rather than anthems. But this has the refreshing side effect of setting them apart from many of their peers, who often want to be either Fontaines DC or Lankum.
Cardinals pick the pockets of their predecessors with an enthusiasm that borders on unseemly – but in doing so they have arrived at the paradoxical position of sounding entirely like themselves.
Masquerade is released on Friday, February 13th
