Wicklow trio Wyvern Lingo have returned with their second album Awake You Lie. Bassist and singer Karen Cowley talks to Alan Corr about recording in Berlin and why they are musos at heart
At the risk of coming across all Smash Hits magazine, not that there is anything remotely wrong with that, we begin with a question that may be on some people's lips when they first encounter Wyvern Lingo.
Just where did they get their name?
The band’s Karen Cowley (vocals, synth, bass) is a mile a minute talker but suddenly her verbal bounce is cut short by my question. "The word wyvern appeared to Saoirse in a dream and lingo appeared to Caoimhe in a dream and we put the two together . . . " she says haltingly.
She may be making it all up (and for the record, a wyvern is a winged two-legged dragon with a barbed tail) but it all adds to the charm and mystique of the Bray trio, which also includes Caoimhe Barry (vocals, drums, guitar), and Saoirse Duane (vocals, guitar).
Friends since school, they began making music together 14 years ago after being raised on the 60's/70's music of their parents, and their own love for 90's/00's R'n'B. Having toured with their former college friend Hozier, the three have been united as Wyvern Lingo for nearly ten years.
"I think there's way more female acts right now that are really challenging the status quo."
Now in their late twenties, they’ve become a singular proposition even as Ireland’s music scene becomes more vibrant and diverse with every passing week. The trio make a beguiling, bejeweled sound, which floats on serpentine arrangements, exotic three-part harmonies, counter melodies, and weird time signatures.
Their 2019 debut was certainly something very new. However, it’s their new release, the kaleidoscopic Awake You Lie, that really deserves to push them into the stratosphere.
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With pandemic restrictions still biting hard, all three now live together in Cowley and her boyfriend’s house in Dublin. "It is kind of a dream you’d have when you were 14 to live together as a band." she says.
They recorded Awake You Lie (and what a lockdown friendly title that is) in JRS studios in Berlin, where two-thirds of the band were based pre-Covid, and they were blessed to get most of it in the can before lockdowns struck.
"We were crazy lucky," Cowley says. "We recorded the guts of it in Berlin so we would have been finishing it this time last year. We did as much of it as possible live because we really wanted to capture that live sound.
"By the time Covid hit, we had enough done to be able to finish it on our laptops at home. We’d all be handy at using the software, but we also had a chance to challenge ourselves.
"Lockdown took away the rules that exist in the music industry - getting it out before a certain season - and that was cool. We were able to work on it until it was finished."
Having addressed issues such as sexual politics on their first album, Awake You Lie takes a more oblique approach, both lyrically and musically. New song Things Fall Apart is an unsettling observation of a friend enduring a toxic relationship, and the band have described Only Love Only Light as a feedback loop of self-love versus self-loathing.
"This album is a different beast. With our first album we had a lot to say," Cowley says. "They were songs we had written and carried with us for years. It was a collection that represented us, it wasn’t an album that had one underlying theme, so a lot of the songs are very different
"But with this album it’s far more about a selective experience of being in our twenties and feeling anxiety and uncertainty and it’s really about watching ourselves and being friends who go through these things. We do address things head-on, but it’s meant to be more of a mood."
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The original plan was to record the whole album in Berlin with the intention of moving there if they liked it. "It attracted us for professional reasons but also personal ones because we love Berlin and we’d always thought about moving city," Cowley says.
"We’ve spent the past ten years of our lives in the band since we all left school. We played with other people and we've been in this band since 2014 and that’s a long time. We really committed to the band and we figured that if we were going to move city, now is the time."
Several years ago, David Kitt came in for some very unfair criticism after he stated baldly and correctly that it was near impossible for most Irish musicians to make a living in their own country. It’s a sentiment that Wyvern Lingo chime with having spent most of the 2019 working on the new album in the German capital.
The band are quick to praise the support of the Arts Council and Culture Ireland, especially in these benighted pandemic times, but Cowley is realistic about the levels of state assistance for the arts in Ireland compared to most EU countries.
"I don't wanna be someone who is begrudging because I have to say in the last six months, we've actually gotten tremendous support by way of grants from different bodies like Culture Ireland," she says.
"This album is really harking back to the music we listened to as teenagers."
"Ireland has always been very good to us and we’ve had good audiences but basically, yeah, it's very hard to make a living consistently. Now that live gigs don’t exist as we know it, every artist is relying on radio and you’ve seen that report. Radio is still a terrible place for playing Irish women and that is just soul destroying and it really does make you think, why bother?
"What do I owe this country that clearly doesn’t want to support Irish women? That’s frustrating. I do think Germany as a whole is just a little bit ahead of Ireland when it comes to kind of normalising not just arts as a job, but also women in the arts."
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As a shocked Kitt found out himself when he made his point two years ago, anybody who suggests that the band move to Germany for good will of course be missing the point.
However, even in the two years since the release of Wyvern Lingo's debut album, things have changed for the better for female artists in Ireland with a new generation of acts such as Denise Chaila and Pillow Queens making valuable points about the industry while also delivering world class music.
"Let's just put our feelings into music and play them and we’re really confident with what we've captured with this one."
"I think there's way more female acts right now that are really challenging the status quo," Cowley says. "It’s so nice now to see other female acts on festival bills. People are angry because it’s just frustrating because it's so old hat, pat on the back boy’s club attitude that is the centre of so many things wrong with Ireland.
"I don't really know who’s winning, I don’t know who is benefiting because there are so many great male acts as well. I’m not trying to put people down."
Awake You Lie presents a fuller picture of what Wyvern Lingo are all about. Album track Sydney brims with the kind of sophisto rock of Thin Lizzy’s Nightlife album, while Aurora takes off on a spiraling guitar solo that would leave Joe Satriani gasping. The insinuating seduction of Things Fall Apart and the drowsy and impressionistic nine-minute closing track In Colour - On The Mend attest to adventure and experimentation.
It’s immersive stuff that reveals its secrets slowly across a set of songs of real sophistication that suggests Wyvern Lingo are total musos.
"Totally, totally. We take that as a compliment," Cowley laughs. "This album is really harking back to the music we listened to as teenagers.
"We rejected song structure ideas and whatever was in the charts and a lot of that comes from acts like Led Zeppelin, total muso 70's rock. Stuff Thin Lizzy. We are into complicated muso music but we’re also big into melody and great song writing."
Caoimhe even professes her love for ultimate muso band Steely Dan but despite that talent for the unconventional, do they secretly harbour ambitions to write a pop banger? "I think if that’s your ambition, you’re probably not going to write one." is Cowley’s short and very reasonable answer.
"With our first album we were more into writing pop songs, we were definitely more about the pop song structure. Now, it’s nahhh - let’s just put our feelings into music and play them and we’re really confident with what we've captured with this one.
"It feels different, it feels like we know every inch of it."
Awake You Lie is out now on Rubyworks
