Co Armagh singer-songwriter Conchur White releases fine debut

He cut his teeth in the atmospheric indie rock band Silences but it seems as a solo prospect Conchur White has really found his voice.

No longer are his words shrouded by the music – they’re front and centre, proud if not always loud – and it feels like he has a lot to say.

On his debut album Swirling Violets, out now, the singer-songwriter from Co Armagh explores death, childhood infatuations, lost love and tragic romance. All the big themes, then, and brought to life with a clever mix of surreal imagery and direct simplicity.

The album opens with Holy Death, a folky, almost jaunty study of mortality. “I got friends, who died, a thousand different times,” he states matter-of-fact, these words setting a tone for the whole collection. “Trumpets leap, the reaper’s melody with buckets of the blood and virtue on the tongue.” It’s ripe with religious imagery and irreverent spirit.

On Righteous, (Why Did I Feel Like That?) – breathy pop over a laconic beat – Conchur again contemplates meeting his maker, this time to question his existence. “Through the storm, in the fire by the tree in the garden, I listened, so why did I feel like that today, God?” He asks.

Conchur White

On the Eels-like 501s, the oblique lyrics give way to snatches of memory, childlike perhaps, to heighten a sense of nostalgia. “I was a kid with a plastic gun, when I saw you dance with your friends in your 501s,” he sings. “You pointed your finger and lifted your thumb, and you blew me away…” Boom, it goes straight to the heart.

Rivers is a haunting love song whose melody seems to drift around Nick Drake style finger-picking.

“Though I need change when I go walking in the dark, I don’t worry about the shadows or the things so ill-informed,” Conchur sings. “I moved rivers for you but the sunlight needs the sky, you wished it all away when you were younger.”

Later, on the shuffling country of I Did Good Today, he seems to seek validation (or is it redemption?): “I’m selfish, I can’t help it, I just want you to tell me a story about how I did good today, about how I fit in.”

And on the title track, a co-write with Iain Archer, and just voice, piano and strings, we find Conchur at his most plaintive and fragile. “Love is a parallel world I’m glimpsing,” he sings, yearning but hopeful. “You see it too.”

Conchur White’s new album

Fawn is another poppy number while The Woman In The War sounds like it’s about to break into Blur’s Tender Is The Night but goes in an unexpected direction. It’s an upbeat and uplifting love song. The album ends with the song Deadwood – ironic as there is no filler on Swirling Violets. Every song is laden with meaning and importance, smart lyrics and gorgeous arrangements.

Conchur explained: “There wasn’t a conscious theme, though the songs operate in the same sort of space, that sense of surrealism. There’s ghosts, there’s other worlds. There’s a cosmic feeling, questions about the beginning and the end and dreams. And then there’s simpler songs, love songs about the feelings of infatuation you have when you’re young.

“There’s not one track on the album that doesn’t mean something to me.”

Listeners will agree.

Check out Swirling Violets – and look out for Conchur White playing in-store shows at Boneyard Records, Derry, and Cool Discs, Derry, tomorrow and next weekend at Bangor’s Bending Sound Records and Starr Records in Belfast – both on Saturday, January 27.

NI band of the hour Chalk up another belter… and it’s techno

Chalk have a new single out this week, the first from their Conditions II EP, and it’s a slight departure from the industrial post punk that has made them Northern Ireland’s band du jour.

Although the ingredients are kind of familiar – it’s half-spoken half sung over brooding, atmospheric noise – Claw sounds more like out-and-out techno than previous releases.

With a thumping 4/4 groove, peaks and breaks, it’s a track that would feel equally at home in the sweaty throng of a blissed-out dance club as in the sweaty throng of a mosh pit at a rock gig. Transcendant, then, urgent and primal, and when frontman Ross Cullen sings “don’t go to bed, don’t see the light, ’cause everything…will all fall apart” it’s as disturbing as it is hopeful.

Chalk

Ross Cullen explained: “Claw is about falling in love inside a nightmare. There’s a mixture of loss and relief that we wanted to capture. Subconscious feelings are at the crux of most of our tracks – something that we started on Conditions EP.

“We still feel like we’re in that universe of figuring ourselves out as people and using our sonic palette to make sense of it. There’s still a few feelings we want to explore and staying in the world of Conditions is something we’ve grown to enjoy – we don’t want to leave just yet.”

Check out Claw, available now, via Nice Swan Records and available on all digital platforms. Conditions II is released on March 1…

Acoustic Ash tracks are worth a Chase

Featuring in Ultimate Ulster for a record third week in a row… yes it’s Ash who have announced they’re releasing Race The Night Extended – featuring acoustic versions, a cover of their pals The Subways’ Oh Yeah (Teenage Years), extended takes and remixes. One of Ash’s neatest tricks is to juxtapose the fragility of Tim’s voice with bombastic fuzz guitar and over-the-top solos.

In the acoustic version of the album’s title track, however, this is turned on its head and the guitars, for once, allow the vocals to soar. It’s rather lovely and shows off the Downpatrick songwriter’s genius knack for melodies that link seemingly incompatible chord progressions.

It’s something else.

Race The Night Extended is released on February 16…

Other music news

Nice to see The Adventures and St Vitus Dance show at the Empire Music Hall was a sellout last week. There’s life in the not-that-young-anymore dogs yet, it seems. So much so, in fact, that the latter band hit the studio the very next day to lay down tracks for a new album. Look out for the new material when it drops – going by just about everything else they’ve done it’s going to be top drawer. And in the meantime check out their track Get Along from 2022. It’s gorgeous, jangly pop that nods as much to Revolver-era Beatles as it does to Teenage Fanclub – and that might just be the perfect mix…

St Vitus

The Dandy Warhols have a new album called Rockmaker, their first since 2020, and there’s an extra reason for fans to get excited. Pixies singer and main songwriter Frank Black (he’ll always be Black Francis to me!) features on the track Danzig With Myself after he hooked up with Dandies frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor in Zurich. And the name comes from how the song, and perhaps much of the album sounds. Courtney explained: “It started with a riff that either sounded like Misfits or Danzig and then got slowed down. Over time, it became the working title, and then we couldn’t change it. I mean, come on… Danzig with Myself? There aren’t a lot of heavy guitar records currently coming out that we like, so that was the impetus for Rockmaker.” Sounds like Rock Music to me…

Being old and lazy and (who said fat???) working from home, this column has become very Belfast-centric over the last year or so and it’s time to make amends. So if any of you reading this – is there anybody out there? – is in a band that has new material out, has a gig coming up, or you are promoting a show, a club night or festival, get in touch. Email me at [email protected] or on X @theesloog (it’s an old nickname!) and I’ll try to feature it here and on Belfast Live…

Dua Lipa reckons the behaviour of Britpop bands such as Oasis and Blur in the 1990s was “obnoxious” – but that was kind of the point. It was a boozy, druggy reaction to the right-on politics of 1980s indie and early 1990s hippy-punk crossover bands such as Neds Atomic Dustbin and Pop Will Eat Itself. The thing she neglected to mention was that lots of Britpop music was pretty obnoxious as well – as watching old Top Of The Pops on BBC2 proves. Remember Menswear, anyone? Let’s hope Dua Lipa has borrowed from the better bands of the era for her new “psych pop” album…