Headgear is the brainchild of Limerick studio rat Daragh Dukes – or perhaps brainstorm would be more apposite, given that this album teems with more ideas per second than Philip K Dick on a caffeine buzz. Not that they’re all Dukes’s own, mind, but he has a knack of synthesizing the disparate elements in such a way as to render the magpie factor moot.
For example, ‘That Make Us Feel (Good)’ has scratchy 78 effects, water-warped guitars, and a ton of filigree, suggesting Beck fronting The Eels. And if a title like ‘Will They Be Friendly?’ smacks of Wayne Coyne, the music’s not far behind – here are sundry echoey pianos and plucked guitars fed through the antique Debrie Parvo lens that made the Mercury/Sparkle/Lips end-of-millennium blues such a thing of grainy beauty.
Further in, ‘Upper (A Melodrama)’ is as fragile and tender as The Blue Nile doing Hank Williams, with The Walkabouts acting as mediators, and ‘Believe In the Fundament’ is a sprawl of virtuoso drumming, modernist-classical piano and layered textures that suggest Kate Bush circa The Dreaming. Lacking ambition, it’s not. I like him best when he’s playing catcher in the wry, as with the oddball ukulele strum of ‘Singin’ In the Drain’ (“Someone get the doctor/I’m not sure yet what for/But it’s one of the big names this time”).
Any complaints? Well, the plot thickens unto the impenetrable in the third act. Plus, I miss the dirt – give me power tools over pro tools any day. But that said, Headgear is a beguiling marriage of bedsit melancholia with laboratory electronica, and quite the chamber-pop pocket symphony.