Who?
Seemingly a trio of singer songwriters – all three offer vocals, and all three clutch guitars – Red Sail hail from Wexford, Navan and Roscommon, but base themselves largely in Dublin, where they’re starting to make an impact on the tough-to-break music scene. They are Sarah McWeeney (vocals and guitar), Simon Fitzpatrick (vocals, keys and guitar) and Dan Comerford (vocals and guitar), and they’ve certainly caught GPs collective eye.
What?
Just an EP so far, which makes it all the more impressively brave that the three-piece are going big and relocating to Germany for a month, using the city of Bremen as a home base for a fairly extensive tour of Germany, Holland and Belgium (and a whole lot of gigs in their soon to be second city, Bremen itself). The EP is entitled ‘Paper Cutouts’, and it’s home to some old-school songwriting styles: Red Sail prefer to use traditional instrumentation to build up tracks that totter somewhere along the edge of the modern folk zeitgeist and thrust heady, layered harmonies to the forefront.
There’s a heavy emphasis on vocals, which sit particularly high in the mix, and a bit of a melancholy edge to the sound, giving a slightly timeless vibe overall. Red Sail claim the odd electronic influence, though we can’t pretend it’s too apparent on the EP: instead we’ve got a record that’s simple in its lyrical sharpness, and could have been drawn from any time in the past fifty years. That’s not such a bad thing: these lyrics are often sharp, especially in lines like this from the opener: “You don’t have a spine, to keep you straight in line and held together.
Why bother?
In a word, vocals. Red Sail are clever, charming songwriters but it’s the depth of their vocal harmonies that make them stand out, especially as a live entity. Goldenplec were lucky enough to be introduced to the band as part of our ‘Coast to Coast Tea and Toast’ activities last year, where they played a one-song set for us in front of a set of castle gates in rural nowhereville and absolutely blew us away. They had nothing more than a couple of guitars to perform with, and producing something so memorable and atmospheric under the ‘one song, one take’ circumstances was an impressive achievement to say the least.
And the flip side?
If you’re going out to be negative, this could easily be categorized as twee folk. That’s not altogether a bad thing – Lisa Hannigan has proven time and again that quality songwriting can overwhelm a heavy sense of twee given the chance – but a post pop-folk world can only be so far around the corner at this stage, and we can’t blame anyone for wanting to look beyond the likes of Mumford & Sons and Of Monsters And Men after they’ve got so much airplay. This is a lot more local and a little less obvious though, so it’ll find a great market, if not quite on the level of might have if they’d started three or four years earlier.
Catch them…
Red Sail play Whelan’s new band’s festival this Wednesday, the 9th of January. They’re also all set for that impressive European tour throughout late January and February, after which we can expect a rising profile in Ireland.
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Up & Comers is jointly produced fortnightly by Goldenplec and
