Latest off the singer/songwriter conveyor belt is Portlaoise tunesmith Gary Dunne, whose single ‘Amerikan Folk Song’ you’ll have probably heard over breakfast recently.
Interestingly, he moves away from lads who currently earn their reputations singing about poverty and war. In ‘Amerikan Folk Song’, he responds to anti-war protests with the excellent ‘I’m not political/And if I sound political/Chicka boom boom chicka boom’. A good solid argument, lodged somewhere between ‘rama-lama-ding-dong’ and that sound you make when you stick your tongue into your bottom lip and sneer.
Elsewhere, Counting Crows-type vocals and gentle melodies support the more traditional themes that serious boys with guitars write; women who won’t sleep with them. “Why can’t we be honest, take it that it’s over?/We’re washing all the dignity away,” is trite on paper, but this and the couplet “I left her standing in the doorway./She said she’s leaving in the morning” honestly make for lovely and uninterruptive music.
Dunne plays with the pleasant rhetoric of American oldboys like Neil Young, and Twenty Twenty Fiction, in spite of its repetitive musical style, is a strong album, albeit a grower.