Ay yes, the return of the Dylan-haired, Oxfam-attired wonderkid from the Kingdom. Check out the sleeve, which shows our hero barefoot, bejumpered and mired in Cassavetes-shaded student squalor: Ciaran McFeely may be many things, but a glam bunny ain’t one of ’em.
The music, thankfully, is a much more day-glo proposition. Exhibit A, a rowdy and unruly ‘Li’l King Kong’, whose banjo-and beatbox combo, scalding slide, falsetto vocal and scattershot lyric suggest Mellow Gold-era Beck channelled through Dave Fridmann’s box of tricks. In the Kid’s universe, the 1980s never happened: he goes straight from early 70s lysergic rock to 90s acoustic corruptions without batting an eyelid.
Among other things, Simple Kid 2 is a hymn to home recording autonomy. The basic tunes were mostly captured on an old 8-track, with C-60 tapes for masters. One imagines the Corkonian spent his pre-adolescent years mucking about with obsolete tape recorders, playing vinyl albums at the wrong speed and looping hours of detuned radio sounds.
So, ‘Self Help Book’ boasts a Canned Eat/Mungo Jerry vocal set to Incredible String Band drones and words that hang suspended between nonsense and horse sense (“If you get drunk tonight/Yer gonna fall down… The darkness is gonna keep comin’ back/Until you wise up, simple as that”); ‘Mommy ‘N’ Daddy is a frail cry against the work ethic, enshrined in the Nuggets constitution, while ‘The TwentySomething’ (“Can’t pay for things we’re buying”) is a Douglas Coupland nursery rhyme with Beatles whimsy on top and Flaming Lips heaviosity on the bottom.
But he also knows when to turn all the extraneous noise channels down and keep it sparse, as on ‘Old Domestic Cat’, a delicate comedown ballad that suggests Will Oldham holed up in some Rathmines bedsit reading Syd’s obituary. Elsewhere, ‘A Song Of Stone’ is freakish anti-folk, and ‘Oh Heart, Don’t Be Bitter’ a campfire Mercury Rev homily.
Consider this album the QED to the formula that maintains Less Money = More Imagination. The Kid done good.