The Strypes at The Academy by Dave Kelly

The Strypes at The Academy, Friday 11th April 2014

Whatever your opinion of The Strypes, one thing we can universally agree upon is that we all wish our band was this tight and popular at seventeen. They can play together in tune and in sync with each other which is more than most teenagers can say about their musical endeavours. Usually it’s enough of a success managing to get four adolescents together in a room with the aim of doing something creative that how good it actually is rarely becomes part of the conversation.

Upon arrival at the Academy The Hot Sprockets are already engaging the gathered multitude. The Sprockets always make everything feel a little cinematic, a bit like the scene with The Yardbirds in Blow-Up. Their style and movement seems meticulously crafted to fit a 1.85:1 ratio, which is probably why their Soul Brother video suits them so well. A melodic blues rock from another age fills their set and it’s very impossible not to latch on to the “ooh-wuhooh-wuhooh” of Cruizin’ any time it appears.

Then the main act arrives, after a brief introduction from BP Fallon in which he lists out a number of artists we believe in, a largely accurate if inconclusive list. What quickly becomes apparent is that this one time blues band – while still sporting the trademark harmonica and mod-like obsession with neat dress – have taken up the sound of a straight punk band. The kernels of punk were present in their early renditions of tracks like You Can’t Judge A Book By The Cover, always opting to focus on the energy rather than the melody. Now however they’ve abandoned melody altogether, so that their entire set is rapid drum-beats and howled vocals.

This music turns up some truly energetic moments, and the band clearly love playing together, but at the same time they seem to have abandoned that thing about them that made them unique; the blues influence. They never really went full tilt into it and now they’re leaving it quickly behind, every time going for the showboaty pop punk riffs to close their songs rather than the timeless blues breakdown to the home chord. It’s a victory of force over emotion.

Peter O’Hanlon and Evan Walsh on bass and drums respectively have proven their credentials. They are an effective and unpretentious rhythm section who get the job done. But the job of the lead guitarist and vocalist is to use that secure base to inject their personalities, which The Strypes don’t quite manage. Farrelly is all sunglassèd and posturing, overly concerned with the look, while McClorey’s technically brilliant guitar playing is emotionally stunted. He never plays anything that sounds like anything.

It does seem a bit harsh to hold a group of youngsters to such high standards, but this is more a criticism of the hype machine that’s trying to present them as a blues band and as a group that are staggeringly better than their age would suggest, neither of which they are. Realistically, they’re far too young to deal with in declarative statements. They’re still in their Mesolithic era, collecting berries and hunting pheasants. They’ve not even begun to till the land yet, they’ve not even started planting seeds. They know how to get a crowd moving, but if they disappeared tomorrow they’d have no legacy.

We await the arrival of a proper show-stopping single, but until that happens there’s nothing about The Strypes that could set them apart from any other band of young punks currently knocking about the back-road pubs across Ireland. They’re not the saviours of rock ‘n’ roll as we’d be led to believe, they’re just a bunch of teenagers having a good time and in reality there’s fuck all wrong with that.

The Strypes Photo Gallery

Photos: Dave Kelly