The first EP from I Have A Tribe (a GoldenPlec “Plec Pick” for 2014) is a tonally complex one, but one emotion is constant throughout the four tracks on ‘Yellow Raincoats’. The emotion itself is hard to identify, but it feels like a dull and desperate depression and it expresses itself in the circularity of the lyrics, the sparseness of the production and the vocal delivery of the man behind the name, Patrick O’Laoghaire.

Whatever that emotion actually is gives a sense of tragedy to the songs, so that we’re quite sure from the beginning that there’s a lot at stake. But the brilliance of the EP is that this feeling never dominates the music. It’s imprisoned beneath the obvious optimism and growing confidence of each song as the instrumentation grows and O’Laoghaire begins to really sing.

It’s undoubtedly the tension between these two elements that first began to grab listeners when Monsoon started to do the rounds a few months before the record’s release. Opening with a tentative yet optimistic high octave piano chord, this opening track explores the fear of an impending tragedy and the catastrophic fallout once it finally comes. The repetition of “monsoon coming/monsoon” is later replaced by an even more emphatic repetition of “cocoon”. It’s the fear of losing everything, followed by the desire to retreat when it inevitably happens, but again, as the piano’s bass notes add body and the electronic drumbeats establish themselves, it’s difficult to see this song as anything other than profoundly uplifting.

Such is the contradiction at the heart of this record, one that uses poetic imagery and tonal contrasts to work out the emotional issues the artist feels compelled by. But to call it “music as therapy” is to devalue what ‘Yellow Raincoats’ actually is. It doesn’t feel like a series of depressed vignettes trying to capture a feeling of aimlessness or unhappiness as the above descriptions may suggest, and it isn’t an emotion adapted to the musical form. It’s an attempt to take these emotions and transform them completely, taking feelings of crippling sadness and finding beauty in them by robbing them of their permanence, instead making them into something formal and transient.

The second track Yellow Raincoats also makes use of winter imagery and a growing musical confidence, but throughout the song beats a repetitive three note electronic drum. It’s similar in conception to ‘Remain In Light’-era Talking Heads – one chord songs from which all the melodic shifts and changes must derive – but unlike Eno’s funky backbeats, this one is as basic and unadorned as a piece of music could be. Taken alone these three notes are the perfect representation of a feeling of hopelessness, and if that’s what O’Laoghaire was aiming to do with with this EP he could have made that the whole song. The challenge he sets himself is to start from this repetitive and frankly quite ugly beat, and use his tools to develop from it, lifting the feeling to one of self-assuredness, but never losing sight of where it came from.

The lyrics are sparse and descriptive, rather than being confessional, but they cannot be separated from their musical delivery. The opening lines of Cavalry – “My pills are gone/my evening’s settled” – almost sound like Frank Sinatra singing “so set ’em up, Joe/I got a little story/you oughta know”. It’s a perfectly ingenious and subtle tonal change, the kind found throughout the EP, which makes a close listen absolutely essential.

I Have A Tribe is clearly a well thought out project, and even the record cover gets the over-arching point of the EP across. In it we see O’Laoghaire sprawled out on his back with a briefcase in hand, as if he has been struck down on his travels and can’t get back up. This is the underlying tone of ‘Yellow Raincoats’, but the defining characteristic is the fact that the photo is turned on its side, so that O’Laoghaire appears to be upright. As with every aspect of existence, it’s all about how you choose to look at it.