THE INSPIRED American Indie-folk band Port O’Brien play Róisín Dubh this Saturday at 9pm, in what will be their second show in the Dominick Street venue.
That first show in October 2008 revealed one of the most exciting indie bands of today truly coming into their own as a powerful creative force. It also ended on a very fun note with the band handing around all manner of kitchen utensils, bits of wood, tubs, etc, to the audience to hit and beat along to the closing number that night ‘I Woke Up Today’.
Port O’Brien are centred around singer-songwriter Van Pierszalowski and instrumentalist/vocalist Cambria Goodwin. Although they hail from California, there is no sun’n’fun hippy lyrics here. This band inhabit a region altogether harder and more remote from the California we are used to.
The band’s roots lie in Cambria, an isolated coastal village in California where Cambria Goodwin works as a baker. Pierszalowski is by profession a fisherman, working at sea for almost six months a year with his father, often in the cold and seas in the Gulf of Alaska.
However both Van and Cambria share a passion for music and began working together in 2005, writing songs and making various rough’n’ready recordings collected on their first album The Wind And The Swell. Many of these tracks were re-recorded with a beefed up sound (thanks to a full band ) and released as Port O’Brien’s marvellous official debut All We Could Do Was Sing.
All We Could Do Was Sing was one of the finest albums of 2008 and revealed a hugely talented songwriter in Pierszalowski. As a fisherman, themes of the sea dominate his work (the band is named after a now-abandoned cannery on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where his parents met ) and this is best heard on two tracks from ...Sing.
‘Fisherman’s Son’ is a beautiful folk epic in which Pierszalowski’s main character tries hard to move away from his coastal town and live life in the big city, but comes to the realisation that the sea and fishing are in his blood and it is a heritage he can not, and does not want to, escape from. ‘Stuck On A Boat’ captures Pierszalowski at sea missing Cambria who is ashore.
Port O’Brien’s music draws heavily on folk music and instrumentation but combines this with an indie rock drive and attack. Their music also draws on that mix of upliftingness and melancholy that is common to both genres.
The band’s most recent album Threadbare was originally conceived as a light hearted song collection, but the untimely and tragic death of Cambria’s younger brother produced a darker and more sombre album. The element of melancholy was understandably pronounced on this record but hope was in evidence on the sprightly ‘Love Me Through’ and the epic ‘Calm Me Down’.
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago. Graham Dolan will be DJing afterwards.
