Enniscorthy musician Steven O’Brien quietly released this album in September of last year to little fanfare, but as quality does, and as it deserves to, it has found its way to an appreciative audience.  ‘Decency Week’ is refreshing in its simplicity, with O’Brien’s witty lyrics backed by a band that sound like they were recorded live right there and then, lending the album an almost impossible-to-fabricate air of life and urgency.

Certainly, the production is at times uneven; levels fluctuate slightly, there is the occasional fuzz where details tend to get lost – particularly the more delicate violin work – but really, this is an unnecessary nit to pick in an album where the Ian Dury-esque lyrics and bedroom punk band enthusiasm of the playing complement each other perfectly. There are lapses into sub-Louie Louie territory at times, and it won’t be the most radical album you’ll hear this year, but it may just be one of the most gratifying.

Some of these tracks seem to have had a previous life with O’Brien’s band The Focus Group, who garnered some praise in the Irish music press a couple of years back, chiefly with regard to the frontman’s way with words. As well as the guitar/bass/drum/keys foundation on this album, O’Brien has added a backing vocalist and Frames fiddler Colm Mac Con Iomaire to this present collective, providing a touch of disparate refinement to these jagged Billy Bragg inflected vignettes. It would be easy to see ‘Decency Week’ as a product of its time, with allusions to the doldrums of recession; Don’t Care Anymore has the singer channelling David Byrne, with O’Brien declaring “it’s a dark winter/the sun shines in our hearts” leading to thoughts of emigration “I don’t really care anymore/I’m walking out the door”; employment, or lack thereof, is discussed in Bits & Bobs and I’m In Retail – one sweet, one sarky; affordable housing in Lets Grow Old Together.

Really though the themes in this album are universal, the stories age old. Our protagonist is the perpetual underdog; self-deprecating – “I could be a choreographer but I’m a terrible dancer” –  charming, humble, naïve yet knowing, all the while with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Anyone who has encountered the litany of excuses from your average doorman will relate to the singer’s tale of being “left standing alone in the rain” – the eternal outsider – in Private Function, set to a punk riff, with this momentum continued in the infectious I’m In Retail which has our man reaching for the stars.

Songs of unattainable love and lust underpin these tales of the everyman – the good guy never gets the girl in Four Letter Words, while in Automatic Doors, with its 50’s style doo-wop lilt, “Automatic doors never open for me”. He’s invisible to her and to the world, stoically fatalistic – “There’s one thing for sure in this life and that’s death/It’s inevitable”. Imagine Jack Lemon trudging through the rain, sodden, bereft of dreams or aspirations, yet contemplating the moon and the tides. This is the kind of song the band would play at the prom while lovers dance, oblivious to the lost soul onstage pouring his heart out. But for all that woe, it soars, and our hero can’t help but revel in his melancholy.

Let’s Grow Old Together comes dangerously close to the saccharine, but it’s executed with such wide-eyed sincerity that it works, as O’Brien and Carole Wood duet “I’ll watch the kids if you wear the trousers/ I’ll watch the kids and you live out your dreams.” It’s charming and funny, employing some rock’n’roll piano to chime away in the background of a simple but effective guitar solo. Mother of Mine ends the album on a more sombre note. It’s a vague sketch of loss, but as with the album as a whole, there’s humour in the pathos “please tell me where did they take you/down winding roads with lights so blue/past broken doors and portaloos”.  It’s a downbeat lament, with the title chanted repeatedly over some gloomy violin and female vocals, almost a funeral dirge.

The most telling moment of ‘Decency Week’ though comes at the end of Lets Grow Old Together, when everyone involved breaks into fits of laughter; this was clearly an album that was as much fun to make as it is to listen to. In opener Clothes, O’Brien muses that “this song is quite cathartic” – I’ll see that and raise him ten.