Every year, Whelans fill the January Gap with an impressively cheap, satisfyingly well-curated long weekend of artists from the Irish underground. It’s like Hard Working Class Heroes, except it’s a tenner for four days (or €5 for one) and you just go to Whelans every day from Wednesday to Saturday.
You might come away from this week’s Ones To Watch 2013 able to tell your grandchildren you saw the next Villagers live in front of a tiny house on a cold winter evening, or you might just catch a fun set by a band who’ve figured their sound out but haven’t quite started to gather momentum yet.
Need help figuring out who you need to see? Here are our picks.
Wednesday:
Boats to Row land in the middle of Wednesday’s folky selection, adding thoughtful, sincere, nigh-whispered singing to flourishing acoustic guitar picking arrangements (which, for some other artists, will be instrumental). They are, out of character for this particular micro-festival, from Birmingham and, the ever-edifying YouTube comments section teaches us, they seem to be fronted by a school teacher. See them if for no other reason than that you probably won’t get another chance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyxmqCHPcVQ
Autumn Owls are slightly harder-nosed, something approaching Ireland’s answer to Grizzly Bear, employing the flutter-then-crash drumming and pretty-then-jarring chord progressions learned from that non-rich section of indie rock royalty. There is more to Autumn Owls than just (audible) influences, however. They are dark and beguiling, textured and affecting, and their particular mode promises a good live show.
Thursday
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/63423040″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Soil Creep is the latest and potentially best iteration of Aidan Wall’s musical output, harder and apparently with more gravity than Hipster Youth and obviously more electronic than the still-excellent Porn On Vinyl. His latest album manages to employ influences as disparate as The Microphones and house music, and it’s clear Wall (still only 22 despite his by-now five-year presence in the Dublin music scene) is expanding into heady territory.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/64600265″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Girl Band kindly note on their Breaking Tunes that we continue to mention for the benefit of our readers that they’re not actually a girl band. They’re still not. With the France ’98 EP last year they expanded into a clearer, even more unsettling territory of noise — not quite assault, but certainly enough to get under your skin. If anyone on the list is an actual ‘one to watch’ in the intended sense, Girl Band are it.
