FEW SONGS capture the flux and white noise of our times quite like ‘Endgame’, the ironically positioned opening track of the debut EP from Galway band The Clockworks.
“We’re…post truth, post Europe, post youth, post modern, post faith and God and, post post too,” declares vocalist James McGregor on this urgent, fast, yet tense track, which finds that thinking too deeply, in a time where opinion is given greater weight than fact, is one where regret and hatred are all too easy to feel.
The gritty realism of life lived in uncertain times continues in ‘Money (I Don’t Wanna Hear It’ ), a domestic drama of addiction and living on the breadline. The energy of the band’s performance, and the dynamics of tension and release, capture the fraught nature of the relationship between the addict and his wife.
Most powerful though is ‘Feels So Real’. It begins with a stormcloud of claustrophobic guitars from Sean Conneely, before morphing into insistent guitar lines, with no loss of ominousness, while McGregor casts a cold eye on his surroundings: “Tripping over bottle tops...syringes, trollies in the river, and gates off the hinges.”
A relief from the darkness comes in the closing track, a quiet, acoustic number, in the style of The Libertines, but even here, a sense of regret, however wistful, remains.
Otherwise this EP is quintessential Clockworks - bleak yet energetic, dark yet thrilling, and with plenty to say. Roll on the debut album.
