The two-woman, one-man rock outfit Penny Arcade from Galway have recorded some fine stuff on a home unit, again dispelling the need for large-budget, big studio scenarios. On ‘Broken’ they pack a powerful punch in a swirly guitars, big chords, biting solos, feedback-overload kind of way, with a tight rhythm section to kick things, but the track suffers from pleasant but anaemic vocals. Joanne Dolan’s drumming has much going for it and so have the band, but they could do with some more rage in their vocals.

Also from Galway come Palmyra. Their ‘Looking For My Baby’ starts with Ray Manzarek-type keyboards, and then moves into quirky Sparks territory, decorated with a sprinkling of bleeps, dots and dashes. There’s not really much wrong with it, and inspirational elements of David Byrne and Daft Punk are well to the fore, but somehow it doesn’t get much beyond being a potentially fine album track in its present form.

Tullamore’s Eustace are a grim bunch. Consisting of three male members of the Eustace family, plus an imported female Sheridan, they give the impression they’ve read the story of The Corrs and used it as their template. But the songs, although played and sung reasonably well, are dreary and laboured, as if the singers have never bothered to actually think too much about their meaning.

Demos are like speeches – you never hear anybody complaining that one was too short. But with Wicklow-based Colm Geoghegan, who has dropped his Plan B moniker to become Broken Boy instead, his new opus opens with a delicious one-minute long piano-led instrumental called ‘Triste’ that leaves you wanting more. It’s followed by ‘Mercy’, a classy helping of Indie-pop, with fine falsetto harmonies and chiming guitars. My main worry with Geoghegan, who plays and sings every note here, is that he might be suspected of flitting frivolously from one project to another like a kid with attention deficiency syndrome.

Dublin band Skandas have finished an album but unfortunately don’t have the money to release it yet. That’s a pity, because it’s an impressive body of work to judge from the three tracks I’ve heard, even if there’s considerable inconsistency in the styles of some of the tracks. Basically they’re a ’70s rock band who allow themselves the opportunity to blend in bits of hard pop, heavy metal blues and contemporary bleep. That may sound like a recipe for a mess but it works because they use a production that gives it a real up-to-date feel.

Band name of the week award goes to The Firearms License Violations, but the song ‘Balaam’s Ass’, written by Mark Francis, fires a few blanks before it moves up the gears. Francis has a solid voice that evokes Nick Cave at odd moments, but the song lacks the necessary hooks to draw you in. I spent most of my time following the tuneful guitar lines.

The home-made no-fi recording of ‘Wonderful Craft’, submitted for scrutiny by Flaming Daniel and Patrick Fantastic (their real names, I presume), is one of the most listless I’ve heard in a while, but in there somewhere there’s a song with more than a little charm. The pair have also mastered the art of writing a convincing begging letter, so I will say that this is the song I’d like to hear given the benefit of a decent studio make-over.