“Goodbye my faith, goodbye my heart.”
Ah, Elaine Doyle, c’mere, would you ever stop being such a fantastic ride? Look at you there, running around the countryside, looking winsome and windswept, not a bother on you as you purr lyrics in perfect time and stare down the sunset like some badass bog Madonna.
Well then, at least put a scarf on, dear, you’ll catch your death of cold out there. Yes, even in August; this is Ireland, after all.
–
Just two months on from their ravishing show at youbloomDublin 2015, Reekus Records’ Riot Tapes are are off and running – rather literally, actually – with their latest release, a single called “Hello, Insanity”.
Recorded at Westland Studios in Dublin’s south inner city, and initially intended as a work-in-progress recording, the since-polished song has been receiving critical praise from fans and industry swingers alike; Joe Donnelly of TXFM has called it “…a thunderbastard of a song.”
Well.
You can see where he’s coming from. As Irish mainstream music goes, this is top stuff. The production is so clean and well-considered, it’s as if the group are aliens – seductively frank aliens – dropped off here to totally steal the show. And this is what they do, with cannonball drums and electro-effect guitar thrum burning up the reel. Donnelly goes on to liken the track to “Heads Will Roll”, by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, quite the comparison, and by all accounts spot on, if the response from listeners of his popular radio show Cheer or Sneer are anything to go on. Riot Tapes, are, quite frankly, killing it right now.
So what does a sassy band of audio assassins do when they’re not busy slaying from the airwaves and the stages of Ireland’s best fests? Why, drive up the mountains and get up to all sorts of antics, of course:
“The shooting of the video (for “Hello, Insanity”) was unusual,” says vocalist Elaine.
“Myself and Chris (our guitarist) agreed on the concept which was basically me running up the Dublin mountains singing along to the song. So one cold sunny morning the two of us headed up to the mountains in Chris’s little Fiesta. We had a camera, a tripod, and some red rope. We put the camera onto the tripod, tied the tripod into the boot of the fiesta and began shooting. Chris drove as slowly as he could and I ran after the car whilst trying to sing. The whole point of the video was to do it in one take.”
“One minute in, we had a problem: my jeans were falling down quite rapidly when I ran. Chris cut off some of the red rope and made me a belt. You can kind of see it in the video if you look really close. We did four or five takes, and used the last one for the video. It didn’t take too long to do at all.”
Talented, tenacious, quite obviously full of creative energy; it must have been off to win over more listeners after the shoot, surely? Actually, uh, not quite:
“We spent longer looking for 50 euro that fell out of my pocket while I was running than we did shooting the video!” Doyle laughs. “We never found it.”
Check out all the pants (and panting!) -related mayhem right here in the video:
Riot Tapes play The Big Viking Picnic, a gig for charity, in Kells, Ireland August 29.
Probably out somewhere quoting Bill Hicks - you know - insisting you play from your heart.
More at: http://shanmduvall.wix.com/shannonduvallwriter
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