Let’s hear it for the drummers. No, really. What’s the one common deficit that renders B-list acoustic minstrels, Verve throwbacks and sundry sadcore combos so intolerable? Lack of beat savvy. But Jeremy Hickey, who began his career with Kilkenny band Blue Ghost before launching himself as a one man band (with back-projected imaginary friends), rarely settles for anything less than polyrhythmically innaresting and arresting.
If his first album, the Choice-nominated double set Organic Matter, at times suggested some weird mash-up between Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Danny Elfman’s first band Oingo Boingo and Stuart Copeland’s Rumblefish soundtrack, all spiced up with a dollop of Sam Phillips slapback echo effects, the subterranean tag is just as apposite this time out.
Here’s an underground realm where troglodyte rhythm savants hash out their own bone machine symphonies on batteries of Oscar the Grouch trashcan percussion in subway tunnels after the I Am Legend apocalypse. Hickey might yet get to soundtrack the gnarlier parts of Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness.
Consider the opening suite of this second record. The title track is a lunatic shuffle that tosses bits of The Cramps, Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps and Scotty Moore’s guitar into a cauldron and stirs until there’s much hubble, bubble, toil and trouble a-seeping from the speakers. Hot on its heels, ‘Before They Make You Run’, with its parping baritone sax, could be a turf war between the psychobilly hordes who nested in Dublin’s TV Club in 1983, and the James Chance-rs, Suicide-ites and Contortions-ists who hung bat-like from the rafters in CBGBs. Except in R.S.A.G.’s coda, the survivors limp uptown to take refuge with Coati Mundi and the Tom Tom Club.
Further down the line, ‘The Mess We’re In’ and ‘Bitter Swing’ could be David Byrne jamming with the Famous Flames, while ‘The Roamer’, the current single, and one of Hickey’s subtler moments, recycles world music and twins Brooklyn with Mali or Senegal. Hickey may at times be a little too much in thrall to classic Heads, but you tend to forgive him when a tune like ‘Hotwire the Heart’ takes that well-thumbed geometric-guitar meets rubbery bass-and-drums Gang of Four thang and steams it up with some properly hot funk. Could be a hit ‘n’ all.
Elsewhere, ‘Hanging On A Lie’ begins like a ‘90s Sundance sleeper soundtrack then slithers awake and uncoils upwards into a sort of Sun Studios cobra dance. Then there’s a back-porch chicken scratch Fat Possum label type strumalong entitled ‘The Mercy Plea’, in which he forges a whole new class of rural music.
No need to be alarmed. Jeremy Hickey knows exactly what he’s doing.

Key Track: ‘Hotwire the Heart’