Record review

Mongrel

3 Oct 2005

Future come and get me

The debut album from Dublin messers Stoat is a slice of quirky and eminently likeable pop fluff. That might sound like a slightly insulting way to describe something these guys spent eighteen years working on, and towards. But I mean it in the nicest possible way. The songs are almost uniformly bouncy and light-hearted and (as befits a record which at turns evokes anyone from A House to Fountains Of Wayne, to They Might Be Giants, to the Saw Doctors) whatever heartache went into putting it together is never passed on to the listener. And because the band are not professional musicians there are no songs about how shit the record indistry is and how having millions of fans hasn't made John Hearne happy. Instead we get him describing being grilled on what he thinks was the pre-eminent macro-economic policy goal of the EU in a job interview on Dame St. In the chorus of the same song he makes "I want to bomb the Central Bank" sound like the least subversive shorus since I Wann Hold Your Hand. Worth the wait.

[Stoat review-of-review: it's bizarre the different reactions different reviewers have - in a previous review the album was called "deranged" and here it's "pop fluff". I suppose there's some truth in both. 6.5 out of 10]