Our Faces of 2010 mixtape will get you acquainted with the best new Irish talent out there right now. Click the artist name to see our blurb on them or click to the song title to listen. A link to the mixtape of all 20 songs is below.

State’s Faces of 2010 Tracklisting

1. Two Door Cinema Club – I Can Talk (Radio Intro Version)
2. Sleep Thieves - City Lights
3. Patrick Kelleher – Until I Get Paid
4. Funeral Suits – Now We’re Moving Now we’re Free
5. Jogging – Not Simple
6. Yes Cadets – Rufio
7. We Cut Corners – Toll Free
8. Nakatomi Towers – Cut Me Out
9. Bitches With Wolves – Tip of My Tongue
10. 8Ball – None of the Above
11. Wounds – Vectors
12. Halves – Blood Branches
13. CatScars – Droid
14. I Am The Cosmos – Remembering You
15. TwinKranes – Fizz nor Feedback
16. O Emperor – Po
17. John, Shelly and the Creatures – Long May You Reign
18. Take the Money and Run – Let the Ground Break Through My Head
19. Carol Keogh – Into the Blue
20. Vengeance and the Panther Queen – Party Fight (demo)

ZIP Download: Faces of 2010 mixtape (102 MB)

Photo: Loreana Rushe

Formed in Belfast in 2008, having bonded over a mutual love of all things Canadian, independent and musical, this four piece made an immediate impression with the release of the Yes Cadets EP a five track confident and expansive debut release. Eclecticism runs through their veins and the band pull dance-punk, gigantic basslines, cascading electro, indie-pop harmonies, glockenspiel and raucous guitar into their unique mix. We’re looking forward to hearing much, much more.

At least there’s no difficulty in picking them out from the tourists and suits who have braved the most miserable night of the year for a drink in town. Anto, the group’s drummer and vocalist, stands out in particular with his shining blonde mop, spirit-level straight fringe, and angular looks. If we were a betting magazine who didn’t know who he was, we’d lay a safe tenner on him being in a band. We’d also have a punt on him being Scandinavian or German with those features, and would definitely pull a double-take if we heard him talk in the friendly northside accent with which he introduces himself. He certainly looks the part for a guy in a band who play ‘popmusik’, or as he later puts it ‘psychedelia – oddball sounds with a pop sensibility.’

‘Oddball sounds with a pop sensibility’; it’s as good a descriptor as any for Twinkranes mercurial debut album Spektrumtheatresnakes, a dark quicksilver rush of a record that welds the weirdest bits of your druggy uncle’s far-out vinyl collection to seething rhythms that rework but never flat-out appropriate elements of motorik and Kosmiche Krautrock. With song-titles like ‘The Market Of The Bizarre’ and ‘High Tekk Train Wreck’, Spektrumtheatresnakes wears its oddness like a t-shirt that says -Dorothy, we’re a long way from singer-songwriter night in Doyles’. Yet, despite the full-on psychedelic weirdness, the album is never inaccessible, a quality which may well have piqued the interest of Twisted Nerve’s Andy Votel who signed the band (the inlay of their album rather stylistically reads that it was recorded over three days ‘at the request of Andy Votel’, making him sound like some sort of Warholian patron and Twinkranes a mysterious, possibly dangerous band that tickled his fancy).

Ray (synths and production) explains how the signing came about. ‘We played a night down in Kennedy’s. Some friends of ours used to run a night called -Maximum Joy’ there. We played the Christmas party and they had Andy Votel over to DJ. He saw us and seemed to buzz off the show. It was a great night, a great gig.’ Anto adds ‘he asked us when we were next playing and came and checked us out with the intention of picking us up and doing a record with us, and that’s what led to the album being recorded. I think he thought that what we were doing fitted in with the Twisted Nerve aesthetic. They deal in psychedelia, oddball grooves, like crazy left of centre bands that you’ve never heard of. So we’re lucky in that what we’re doing fits with what they do.’

It seems that Twisted Nerve is the perfect home for Twinkranes, and an ideal network (‘a spidery network’ as Anto describes it) for getting their sound out to people who appreciate that sort of thing, people such as journalists writing for the NME, the Guardian and Mojo who have all given the album sterling reviews. After plugging away at the Dublin scene for five years, Anto and Ray seem under no illusions that it’s often the right connections with the right people who can suddenly afford you that sort of exposure. Indeed, they give the impression of feeling genuinely blessed to have been picked up by a label such as Twisted Nerve. They are also excited by the opportunity it affords them to put more time into tricking about in the studio, and the chance to tour and meet all-time heroes such as Simeon from visionary sixties synth outfit Silver Apples who they supported in Dublin.

Anto explains that with ‘Spektrumtheatresnakes it’s very much the live aspect that shaped the record. When we went into the studio a lot of it had already been developed live. What we recorded was pretty much a live set. Next year it would be great to spend some solid time in the studio, work on music that way you know? Also, they [Twisted Nerve] never dictate. We can pretty much work on what we want. I mean we’ve recorded an hour and a half of grooves and they are going to put that out on some library releases. They’re just mad for getting releases out really.’ If an album as fine as Spektrumtheatresnakes is the product of three days studio time for Twinkranes, then the prospect of them being let loose in a studio for an extended time is an exciting one.

In the meantime, they plan to tour the album and perhaps play a few festivals in Europe. So, if you end up mangled, lost, and zoning out at Primavera next summer while watching a pale drummer with an intense gaze hammering out relentless cosmic rhythms and singing about witches, throw him and his bandmates a psychedelic wave- sure it’s only Anto and the lads from Twinkranes.

Photo: Loreana Rushe

Photo: Loreana Rushe

Photos: Richard Gilligan

Rooftops

8Ball | MySpace Music Videos

The band formed when the guys were in their teens, with frontman Alex being the chief songwriter. Named after Sam misheard the name of a local ‘Tudor Cinema Club’, they released their first single -I Can Talk’, in December and are about to embark on a year of touring in support of Tourist History. The album, which is crammed full of electro-heavy indie songs that ‘are about our progression as a band and experiences that we’ve been through together’ (Alex), will appeal to fans of Passion Pit, Phoenix and Foals, and certainly justifies their placement in the recent BBC Sound of 2010 poll. Although they didn’t scoop the top spot, it was proof that the future is bright for these young men, who will release their latest single, -Undercover Martyn’, on 22nd February.

Here, they tell State about how far they’ve come – from travelling around the country in a dirty old van that stank of dog (having been previously owned by a pet grooming business) – “All of us up the front, crushed in and no sleep or anything,” as Alex puts it – to signing autographs for screaming Japanese teenagers.

How does it feel to have the band doing so well – before you’ve even released your debut album?

Kevin: It’s been really slow which is good I think, we haven’t had to be thrown into anything, we just work away. I guess some people ask us, they look at what we’re doing and they say, ‘Oh is it just crazy, does it blow your mind, is it mental’..and it’s not really, it’s just like slowly built up to it, so I think it’s a really nice way of doing it.

Can you take us back to the beginning – where did you all meet?

Alex: We met when we were about 15, in grammar school, and I guess a couple of months from when we started hanging out we started playing together. We spent two weeks of a summer in Sam’s garage and just started to play really bad teen rock music together. That continued for about a year or so and when that ended the drummer that played with us left the band that we were in but the three of us still wanted to continue doing what we were doing; but by that stage we’d kind of grown up a bit I guess and we wanted to make a different kind of music that was more suited us and more suited other people as well. We were listening to so many other types of music and at that stage we were just confining ourselves to this one genre and we wanted to broaden that a little. So with this band we don’t like to confine ourselves to anything, especially since we have the laptop and we can experiment and do things like that, you know, we can play lots of different types of music if we want to. That started two years ago and since then it’s just been writing and recording and playing shows.

Sam: We were pretty lucky in the sense that once we left school over that summer between our last year in school and whenever you’re supposed to go to university, we were lucky in that we had sorted out a booking agent so we had stuff lined up for September so we weren’t sitting about too long. After that we met a few managers and got that pinned down.

What kind of music were you all listening to at that time?

Alex: The stuff that we started listening to back then was stuff that we listen to today, it’s just that we listen to so much more. I guess we kind of bonded over the one band – that was Biffy Clyro. All three of us were mental for that band and that was the first show all three of us went to together, we went to see them in Belfast.

Kevin: We were big fans of At The Drive-In as well.
Alex: And Six Star Hotel, from Belfast.

Kevin: We basically tried to rip [At The Drive-In] off for a year and a half and it didn’t go anywhere and we didn’t really enjoy it.

You were saying that you don’t like to confine yourself to one sound, is that important in the sense that you don’t want to get pigeonholed?

Kevin: I don’t think it’s a conscious thing so much, it’s more like whatever works at the time just gets used.

Alex: We’ll only let a song come to fruition if it comes naturally and it means not trying to steer it in a certain direction. So we just write songs that feel right to us.

What’s the songwriting process – has it changed over the years?

Alex: It’s all different. It’s different every time. It can start from any place and it can end up in any place. You know, all three of us are all involved in it. But it’s different every time.

You had a period where you were without a drummer and now you have one, so how did you work with that; did you find there was not a major difference?

Kevin: He’s only there for just live gigs, so we kind of see it that we always want to improve on when we play live and I think the first step for most bands is a lighting rig, and then for us we had an extra step which was a drummer. It’s kind of filling in a bit of a visual and a sound void as well that we had, just giving a bit of depth to the sound I guess. I think visually it seems much more deep. You can’t beat the live sound when you have a live drummer.

Alex: Just having a live drummer on stage there was just an extra energy and presence there as well.

Kevin: There was just a bit of a void when there was just three of us at the front.

Alex: I think that’s all fair and well if you are a straight-up electro band, and I’ve seen a lot of people doing that these days. I think for us personally we play a variety of different…like there is electro in there but we play a variety of different pop and indie and stuff as well and there is a lot guitars involved and I think it needed something to boost it a little.

Kevin: And we still run the laptop live.

Photo: Loreana Rushe

Resolving to avoid fancy studio wizardry wherever possible, she has recruited a full backing band to play alongside her during recording sessions. The results are outstanding, full of delicately executed melodies and with Keogh’s unmistakable voice charged with warmth and emotion. She’s also been quite prolific. Not only is an EP nearing completion but work on her debut album – Mongrel City – is also at an advanced stage and is due for release later this year.

We start off with the synth pop of Sleep Thieves, the trio who set out in 2008 to bridge the gap between off the wall indie music and dance tinged electro. They emerged from their cluttered studio of keyboards, synths and laptops with a batch of songs that achieved their initial aim handsomely. Two singles and a growing portfolio of gigs have put them in a fine position to stake their claim over the next twelve months.