The guys from Mr Rosso bounce in all bobbing blonde hair and gusto, despite the fact that one half of the band, Isaac Clarke, is sick and has to take Nurofen and a homeopathic solution, which we all taste and agree is quite tasty. It’s two days before their gig in the Barricade Inn and they’re unbelievably relaxed about the whole thing.
They aren’t afraid to make mistakes onstage because they say it becomes part of the spectacle. They’re funny and off the cuff and are capable of dealing with things as they arise. There is little or no cognizance of being hypertrophied music machines in them because they’ve been making and sending music out into the world for years. It is a hobby at this stage, basically a daily routine.
That explains their capacity for it then, although Isaac bemoans the fact that he has a lazy personality. They’ve been pretty prolific up until this point, Henry Ernest especially, as he also releases solo material under his Dr Duloc moniker.
They started a label on Bandcamp, Herzog TV, to play host to their own material as well as their friends music. Seemingly, their South Dublin setting is home to a burgeoning scene with Herzog TV also playing host to Shane BFlats, Hawarden Kite and Doobey Scoo. “It’s something I started two years ago. We have a vast pool of friends who all make music. We wanted to put it all on the one place.”
“I’ve been releasing music on this shitty SoundCloud account since 2008 on this account called Feeling Suppressor,” Isaac says, so with a bit of quick calculation the facts present themselves. Isaac’s now 17 so that would have made him ten when he started this account. Whether this makes a difference or not is hard to reckon, but it surely doesn’t hurt their prospects that they were such young learners, although Isaac continues to be modest and self-deprecating.
“I’ve always been a lesser musician to all the other boys on the scene because whereas they’ve been making albums I’ve been making these one minute joke songs because I’m so lazy.”
“Isaac has an arsenal of unreleased songs and he never makes an album so it’s just terrible,” Henry adds before going on to say “We write songs non-stop, it’s just the recording sessions that are really, really boring. Our recording sessions are just miserable.”
So what about the new album then? It’s unnamed as yet, though Isaac says that he wants the album to have an acronym that spells HER, what with the thematic strain running through the songs hinging on “the game of love.”
That kind of half ironic, half serious wordplay is rife throughout their work. They seem to be fully devoted to the idea of making something creative, though the seriousness of that endeavor has already fallen away, making them either extremely pragmatic or prematurely cynical. You can get a better sense of this by checking out their band description on the Herzog TV Bandcamp.
“On the last album we constantly mention Vico, who are these group of friends that we have and we used to hang around with a lot last year. They’re obsessed with pulling girls and as research for the album we’d go out with them and they’d try to coach us on pulling,” Henry says
There will be a kind of back-and-forth on their forthcoming album as they trade vocal duties during songs by referencing each other as ‘I’ and ‘H.’ This urban sensibility, tied up in rap and hip-hop, is dotted throughout their work, with songs that are basically rock and hip-hop mash-ups, the absence of which in modern music bemuses the pair.
They’re also notorious procrastinators; why, just a day or two before meeting with them they spent hours going back and forth between houses as an old-fashioned bartering session broke out over a slightly torn, slightly ragged Lacoste jumper belonging to Isaac’s brother.
“He wouldn’t trade so the next day I got more jumpers and tried to trade. I gave him five jackets, four jumpers and a couple of fleeces for this. Then I went up to my friend’s house and he had the same jumper so now I have two of them. So that’s just what recording is most of the time.” Henry says, proudly sporting the jumper in question.
They record their music in Isaac’s bedroom using a “shitty mixer” and audacity to come up with their lo-fi sound. The process is hit and miss, in that the mixer makes their music sound tape-recorded and runs the risk of turning out pretty gritty.
“It’s just random if a song sounds good or not. We always have 30 songs recorded for an album so the way it pans out is that some of them sound awful. We can’t really control what it sounds like, the ones that sound good make the album.”
The complexity and perspicacity of their musical interests, the odd running themes dotted through their lyrics and in their personal lives make for music that is extremely individual. Isaac, at one point, points out the irony of hearing someone call their lyrics funny, because they’re not supposed to be funny, but really they are. Their personality can’t help but shine through and they’re incredibly humorous, not at all serious throughout the conversation.
So it’s with a huge sense of excitement that we await their forthcoming, un-named, 12-track album which, going on the impression of one song, sounds more polished and produced than their previous efforts.
“It’ll be fully done in a week or two. The Little L release, they want to do it in December. We’re not too bother but they want to set up press and stuff like that; we’re not too pressed on the press.”