Good Old American Indie-Dependence

There’s a huge underground hype-machine winging its way to Whelan’s later this year, if whispers whizzing around hip musical circles are to be believed.  A new North American 5 or 6 piece are pencilled in to be the new ‘thing’ for the entire month of November.  From Baltimore or Brooklyn, or maybe it’s Canada, they’re said to be from that peripheral country-folk branch of American indie, with a good dollop of Talking Heads thrown into the mix to make them extra unique.   The four people who’ve actually seen them in rehearsal are already comparing them to Clap Your National Grizzly Cold War Wolf Fleet Horses Parade, Yeah.  And Talking Heads.

Don’t worry if you think you might forget about them by the time the tickets go on sale, you won’t be able to avoid the hype, particularly as their stunning, never-been-done image will be all over the press by then: checked shirts (worn outside saggy jeans), beards, receding hairlines and at least one member, most likely the bassist, or possibly the drummer, will be wearing a baseball cap. 

The hottest tickets in town are set to go on sale shortly at a recession-busting €16 – so now’s the time to start planning your appeal to smug ticket holding hipsters in Camden Row on the night.  Even if you don’t get in, simply read the collection of awe-struck post-mortems here the following morning and gain enough knowledge to claim you were actually there, before you become one of  only 40 people to spend €43 on a ticket to the band’s second Irish gig, probably already pencilled in for Vicar Street some time after the hype has jumped the shark.

The Whelan’s audience is likely to be made up of young Irish males who want to look like American petrol pump attendants: checked shirts (worn outside saggy jeans), beards, receding hairlines and/or baseball caps.  They’ll all be stroking their fuzzy chins, while nodding furiously and knowingly along to tunes they want everyone else to think they already know.

And if you think you see a bizarre protrusion under any of their shirt-tails, it’s probably just the Pitchfork they keep permanently wedged up their arses.  Before you ask,  all of them have already allocated this gig a whopping 9.1 based on their unrealistic expectations – whether it turns out to be the most eye-watering, skid-marked bilge they’ve ever witnessed, or merely a distinctly average American indie gig which therefore becomes eminently overratable, given its sell-out status and the fleeting, self-satisfying nature of indier-than-thou-ism.  I swear I will be saying I was there.