Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands – Golden Syrup
(released on Osaka Records on the 15th of July).
‘GHOST-DISCO-DEATH-MUSIC’
Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands’ latest release is Golden Syrup, a wonderfully skewed album of heartfelt weirdness and adventurous eclecticism. This project brings the maverick Kelleher together once again with His Cold Dead Hands — featuring members of Catscars, School Tour, and Hunter-Gatherer — to serve up a refreshing mélange of textures, sounds, and styles over the course of eleven tracks of outsider-pop par excellence.
Tuneful melodies lurk underneath the surface of these songs, the echo-laden vocals voicing lyrical musings on isolation, contact sports, broken-up relationships, eye-poking, ghosts, and miracles candles; all underpinned with keyboard sounds, electronic drumification, and inventive bass-lines. Similarly, the unpolished production is suitably crepuscular, the recording coming across like a ghostly party, held in a parallel 1980s where David Lynch controls the airwaves.
Golden Syrup is a testament to a musical inventiveness that draws on a variety of styles (electronica, post-punk, disco, folk), yet goes beyond the constituent elements to create a distinctive group sound. Some of the record’s highlights include the haunted-disco of ‘Miracle Candle’ (with it’s pop-tastic refrain of ‘I poke you in the eye’), the beautifully melancholic balladry of ‘Broken Up Now’, and the synth-heavy drones and repetitive groove of ‘Gouge’. A special mention must go to ‘Strawberry Dog’ for the astounding bizarreness of its opening — think Mantronix re-imagining ‘Frère Jacques’ with animal noises and a solfege-singing baby robot — and also for the beautifully contrasting simplicity of intertwining vocal melodies which follow.
While Golden Syrup won’t be to everyone’s liking, Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands are undoubtedly exploring exciting musical territory on this recording, their ingenuity and craft signaling that Ireland’s musical underground is alive and well.
I highly recommend investigating this album, it’s certainly one of the best releases so far in 2011.
Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands mark the release of Golden Syrup with launch gig at The Grand Social, Dublin on the 15th of July.
Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands – Golden Syrup by osakaRecords