Album reviews: Simple Kid and Blind Stitch fly the flag for Cork creativity
Left, Kieran Mac Feely aka Simple Kid; right, Kevin Murphy aka Blind Stitch.
★★★★☆
Simple Kid, aka Kieran Mac Feely, is one of the great lost talents of Irish music. He blazed brightly and briefly in the early 2000s, releasing two collections of thrillingly wonky indie pop that drew on country rock, psychedelia and krautrock and into which are sprinkled judicious helpings of Leeside idiosyncrasy.
But the Douglas musician stepped away from rock’n'roll as his life as a working musician turned from dream to slog (it didn’t help that his American record label likened him to Bob Dylan – a vaunted comparisons that did him few favours).
Yet, though Mac Feely, now a teacher in Hastings in the UK, gave up on the music industry he never stopped writing. And his third Simple Kid album (culled from a decade plus of bedroom recordings) reminds us that, in the long run, art always trumps commerce and that talent doesn’t need a spotlight in order to shine.
The Road, propelled by a disembodied narrator, has a haunting outlandish quality; Only When You’re Young is a wonderful mash-up of Sixties power-pop and grunge-era garage rock, fuelled by McFeely’s expressive voice.
He’s a great ballad writer, too. Lost In Space (Forgotten Man) is a gorgeous mid-tempo mash-up of early Pink Floyd and a woozier Beck. After a complicated separation from the recording business, Simple Kid shines on and it’s a delight to catch up with his ongoing adventures.
★★★★☆
Kevin Murphy is a Zelig of Cork pop, having worked with everyone from The National and Bon Iver to Gavin Friday and Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode (he is also part of Slow Moving Clouds and Seti the First).
The Monkstown musician's new project, Blind Stitch, is a low-key, heart-stirring delight – glum and fraught in places yet illuminated by an infectious optimism.
Scraping cello and clamorous drums introduce opener Nobody Loves Me, a Biblical chugger that suggests Nick Cave lost in a Celtic otherland.
Ennui is ever-present. But Murphy brings urgency and energy to Salt In Silk, a gothic power ballad infused with the frantic melancholy of early Cat Power. Best of all is the title track, where a bare-boned piano is paired with a melody that swirls like a whirlpool dragging you down to forbidden depths.
