A rural outpost in West Limerick is the last place you’d expect to find a free form art rock indie band but here is youthful trio Bleeding Heart Pigeons and a debut that bristles with endless invention, novel lyrical concerns, and abstract melodies.
Frontman Michéal Keating and bandmates Brendan McInerney and Cathal Histon chart their journey from childhood to the joys and pains of adulthood on Is, a transition from the sureties of their conservative rural background into a wider world of art, music and film.
It’s an hour plus collection (some songs run to ten minutes) and Bleeding Heart Pigeon’s determination to avoid the bleedin’ obvious finds them wandering into a maze of musical reference points. In The Forest, I Feel Bizarrely More At Home starts with the clipped minimalism of early Cure before tripping away into off-kilter atmospherics while A Hallucination displays a deft interplay of droning guitars, skittering percussion and electronica. Elsewhere, Sister is all Arctic chill and rippling guitars before it too takes an abrupt change of direction into austere electronica as the story becomes a darker and more troubled psychodrama.
Radiohead, Wild Beasts and The God Machine are among the musical and lyrical touchstones and Keating sings these songs of callow existentialism like a deranged choir boy. It’s like he’s pouring the contents of his teenage journal into verse form. He also reveals a Morrissey-like waspishness on Anything You Want and that wry gallows’ humour is at its very best on They’re Cutting Down The Old Oak Tree which tells a fatalistic but funny tale of the end of innocence.
Multi-layered and dense, it can be a demanding listen but every song here is a exacting labour of love and it shows. Is is a sprawling and at times unfocused debut but for pure adventure and experimentation it really does capture a feeling of shifting personal values and desires. Bleeding Heart Pigeons ache with a sense of longing and also fear for what’s really out there.
Alan Corr
