Hot Press meets Tieranniesaur

If you’ve yet to hear ‘DIYSCO’, the effortlessly bouncy title-track from Tieranniesaur’s second album, I have two pieces of advice for you; one, get yourself over to soundcloud.com/tieranniesaur at the nearest opportunity and give it a digital spin, and two, don’t waste time trying to figure out what you’re listening to.

As well as challenging your spelling abilities, the name ‘Tieranniesaur’ has come to represent a haphazard musical mishmash, an uninhibited hodge-podge of instruments and genres that can sound downright strange on first play. But, as husband and wife team Annie Tierney and Pádraig O’Reilly point out, this might have more to do with the predictability of the current pop soundscape than their madcap sonic scheming.
“Stuff like pitch correcting and all these things that you can do with Pro Tools,” O’Reilly says, “once you know what that sounds like, you can hear it everywhere. I can’t listen to that – it feels like you’re listening through a fog of a computer and you don’t actually hear the performance.”
“But a lot of people really don’t hear that stuff,” Tierney adds, “and if everything hasn’t been quantised or whatever, people freak out.”
The group’s new album will probably confuse music lovers who survive exclusively on a diet of Rihanna and Pitbull. Tierney hints that Tieranniesaur fans might be just as surprised by what they hear.
“I definitely didn’t realise how weird it was until it was finished,” she tells me. “I think when I was making it, I kind of thought it was more straightforward than it actually is. It’s only when it was finished that I realised that it’s a bit mad!”
The glam synthplay and earwormish bassline on the new single are right out of 1977. Who’s the disco fan, then?
“We all are, probably,” Tierney says. “Definitely myself and Pádraig and Ian. That type of music was something we wanted to do with this band. There was a bunch of influences, punky stuff but also disco stuff.”
“We just want to make Nile Rodgers proud!” bassist Ian McFarlane offers.
“Things like EST and The Slits were an influence,” Tierney explains, “but also any kind of early ‘80s stuff like Janet Jackson. We’re not really a disco band. I know we talk about it and everything, but it’s more like a punky party band.”
That said, when Pádraig mentions The Clash, even his fellow band members seem surprised.
“Yeah!” he insists. “I actually think there’s something of The Clash in there, and nobody ever says it. They were mad into Chic and Nile Rodgers, who are really trendy at the moment but that’s something that we were talking about when we started the band.”
Of course, as Tieranniesaur are an independent outfit on a budget (“Yeah,” Tierney laughs, “no budget!”), the production values on DIYSCO are not exactly what we’re used to hearing from the golden era of funk.
“Pádraig records everything at home so it’s a pretty basic set-up,” Tierney says. “It’s completely different to anything those bands would have done.”
“That’s the main contradiction,” O’Reilly muses. “If we were a really scuzzy garage band and we recorded the way we did, you wouldn’t hear anything strange about it. Because of how the tunes sound and because of how we do it, it’s a mismatch.”
“And that’s what we really like about the band,” Tierney adds.
I have to wonder if they’re ever tempted to take things in the opposite direction, to opt for the glossy and the precise over the fun and the freeflowing...
“It’s a tricky thing to try and figure out,” Tierney admits, “whether to clean up your sound or just keep it the way it actually is.”
Especially, I offer, when the likable messiness of Tieranniesaur serves as a welcome antidote to music that feels like it was created in some twisted pop mixologist’s laboratory.
“There’s loads of stuff that you hear on the radio that’s like that,” O’Reilly agrees. “And it’s not a particular display of skill or anything. You can download something for free and click the big red button that makes everything nice. It’s not like, ‘Wow, that guy’s great!’ There’s a button you can press that we didn’t press.”

DIYSCO is out now on Popical Island. Tieranniesaur play Whelan’s, Dublin on May 10.