“Those folks who say there’s no good new music out there anymore - you are just not looking enough!” That‘s what you should say, and the new EP by Irish band Nerves called Iarmhaireacht should be proof enough for that statement! Welcome to the most exciting EP this month!
Now let‘s see – who of you knows without looking it up – where in Ireland County Mayo is “located”? — not too many right? I also only knew it was on the West coast of Ireland and had an idea of it because of knowing its bordering counties to the north and south. Mayo itself is a very rural part of the country without a town/city bigger than 15,000 inhabitants and thus one might wrongfully assume that hardly any music relevant for VoS could come from there. Wrong! Nerves is a four-piece from County Mayo and they embody so many things this website stands for – modernity combined with an ear for traditions, a love for too many genres to name and skills to bring them all together.
To clarify that: Nerves make Noise-Punk with the open attitude of the 80s, where that could mean nearly anything from Post-Punk to Noise-Rock to Hardcore to New Wave. One can easily find traces of most of these in the Nerves-sound – and several more, even something like Techno. They combine an idea of old, rural Ireland with the decay of modern society – and use the combination to show how this part of Ireland is just as left behind as it was some 50 or 60 years ago. The guys use some Irish terms for their EP title and some song titles and even incorporate some old footage from national TV station RTÉ to bridge the gap between the old and the new and to show that the problems somehow remain the same. Take the EP title Iarmhaireacht for example: it is nearly impossible to translate it from (modern) Irish into English but it means something like ”the uncanny feeling at dawn” - the feeling that another day of the same old, same old creeps up on us and we can’t escape it. The three short interludes on the record (one of them the intro) also have Irish titles: ”iarthar”, “iarmhar” and ”néifinn” - “west”, “residue” and “I will not” and you can make of them what you will, to me it indicates that one doesn’t want to stick up with the west left (behind). The other tracks are an exploration on the connection between the inner self and the outer world and how the former is infected (or affected?) by the latter. We are being left behind by so many things, people, groups, ideas – so how can we cope with all that loss? Do we crumble? Do we build? Struggle? Stand up? And when doing any of that – will we come out at the other end as the same person or as someone different? Will we like that person still? Or maybe more? Question upon question and one can easily recognize the old conflict between man and society in a way.
Musically, one can, no one must attest that this EP and its near 27 minutes are some of the most exciting news one can hear this month of August. Every track is a bit different, all of them are noisey, some ideas are based on classic Punk ideas – like the vocal intro to ”Dirty Fingers” - one track, the final ”Don’t Let Go” opens like a near Ambient but then Techno track, but there is one thing that connects all of them in a miraculous way: the will to do things differently, maybe that’s the reason why they chose Dan Fox (from the Gilla Band) to produce the record. The other thing they are not afraid of is the use of a huge wall of sound to chop or speed the tracks up. The band could be compared to bands like IDLES, Jesus Lizard or maybe even Gilla Band because they also provide that extra rush of adrenaline to the head, just take the machine gun like intro to “Takes a Second”! However, there is one thing to be said about Nerves: they’re not like any of these bands. They’re just the lads from Foxford, County Mayo making the music they like. Music we like - good new music! Exciting!
