If you were going to try and throw a blanket over everything that constituted art rock these days…well, you’d need a pretty big blanket.
Mining the almost limitless breadth and depth of those caught under it has been a lot of fun over the last couple of years though, even if the margins have dealt out some emphatically Critics-New-Clothes stuff.
Silverbacks are from Dublin, a city with a grand poetic tradition and more than a few decent art rock bands of its own at the moment. Lining up with Daniel and Kilian O’Kelly, Peadar Kearney on guitar and Emma Hanlon on bass (plus ‘A. Drummer’), the quintet’s 2020 debut album Fad was produced by Girl Band’s Daniel Fox, a job he reprises on Archive Material, a follow-up on which they once again rarely stop moving.
Early on, the siblings looked for sonic kicks in the unlikely place of their Da’s CD collection and, as luck would have it, he was into the likes of Frank Zappa instead of Frank Sinatra.
Latterly, the pair experimented with Pavement and Television, the latter’s influence framed most obviously on the deadpanned scuzz of They Were Never Our People, which lyrically deals with a town cut off from the world after the opening of a new bypass.
Being picky you could argue that what most of those Gen-X outfits lacked was some energy, but the Dubliners prove that not all legacy character traits are theirs to own. The titular opening track boils with a scratchy restlessness, the guitar in jazzy, almost joyous mood, whilst the mechanics of working for less than a living are put under the microscope.
There’s an elephant in nearly everyone’s room however, and whilst other artists have dealt with the pandemic allegorically or at arm’s length, to Silverbacks’ credit they’ve been able to frame the mundanities of some people’s lived experience.
On Different Kind Of Holiday, the spotlight falls on the phenomenon of community payback which lockdown forced on strangers over the hedge, whilst A Job Worth Something sees brother Daniel trapped inside the guilt of being in a white-collar profession whilst his sister nursed patients on a COVID ward.
Only once does the idea and practice separate to an uncomfortable degree; on Recycle Culture’s going nowhere stream of consciousness, sample lines: ‘A taboo tintin/A corkscrew mannequin/Obnoxious expats/Horse down Doner kebabs’.
It doesn’t all have to make sense of course, and there are no rules now, if there ever were. But the mid-project instrumental Carshade sounds good anyway, letting in some cinematic light, whilst Hanlon’s vocal contributions smooth some of the abrasion and their value shouldn’t be underestimated.
This is especially true for I’m Wild, the closest she and they allow themselves to get towards the frontier of conventional indiedom, and although that’s still more than an arm’s length away, nobody loses face because of it.
The problem with art rock is that it can sound like it’s being too clever for its own good, an in-joke where the listener is somehow the punchline.
On Archive Material, Silverbacks declare their genius but do so with contrition, the result thinking fella’s music that’s not bothered what your certificates are in as long as you’re here to dance.
In an age where everything seems to come with strings attached, what’s to stop you joining them for the most fun you can have under a blanket in 9/8 time.