Albums Of The Week: Silverbacks | Easy Being A Winner
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “As a band, Ireland six-piece Silverbacks are restless, eager to move onto the next thing: Three albums in four years is evidence of this. That their fizzing, rock-addled songs rarely pass the four-minute mark is further proof. But in their personal lives, they’re not restless. In fact, they’re settling down”.
Lead singer and guitarist Daniel O’Kelly now lives on the outskirts of Paris with his wife — it’s where he sees his immediate future too. His brother, guitarist Kilian, has moved to Drogheda, an hour north of Dublin, with wife and bandmate Emma Hanlon, where they’ve discovered a newfound interest in plants (red hot pokers are their favourite). They’re content. Their relationships — their friendships — take the pressure off the music and ultimately allows for something that is more enjoyable to make, and perhaps, as a result, sounds more authentically like Silverbacks too. As they sing on the closing track of third album Easy Being A Winner: “You start to figure it out.”
Silverbacks figured some things out on their debut album Fad, released as the Covid pandemic had shut almost everything down in summer 2020. It was recorded sporadically across a number of short studio sessions. It’s an album, but also a collection of songs of their genesis as a band. The followup, Archive Material, was recorded and mixed while navigating the lockdowns. As a result, the way they had to record and produce it put the band under more pressure than they would have liked. So the plan for album No. 3 was simple enough: Record with a much more relaxed schedule in mind. And they did. Silverbacks also welcomed a new member to the band during the recording process of Easy Being A Winner, Paul Leamy. He brought fresh energy, fresh ideas, and, as he played bass, it freed up a lot of room for Emma on vocals.
It all allowed for more instrumentation and vocal layering between Daniel and Emma. The results are sumptuous, with gorgeous coos interweaving across Giving Away An Inch Of and Hide Away. The chorus of the latter was lifted from one of their very first demos as a band; Emma always liked it, so they decided to revisit it. Such is the breezy confidence of a band on their third record together.
But Silverbacks didn’t simply sit back and go through the motions on Easy Being A Winner. The relaxed schedule allowed them to get some friends and family on the record. The spiky Something I Know features clarinet parts performed by Daniel and Kilian’s dad, John. “We always wanted to get him on a Silverbacks record,” explains Daniel. “Kilian and I owe so much of our interest in music to him. Initially we had mapped out for him to play the backing melody in the verses, but we had the idea of trying long clarinet notes in the chorus. It ended up sounding so good we scrapped the parts (that my dad had spent hours rehearsing for) so that the big clarinet moments only happen in the choruses. Dad didn’t mind.
“Dad also recites a few words I had prepared for him at the end of the track. It’s a small poem I wrote called the Desert’s Door. My wife’s father passed away in 2022. He was from Algeria and spent a lot of his time at a place the locals call the door to the Sahara. My father and her father never got to meet unfortunately, so I like that we managed to connect them in some way.”
Photo by Roisin Murphy O’Sullivan.
As with Fad and Archive Material, Silverbacks recorded Easy Being A Winner with Dan Fox (Gilla Band) in Sonic Studios in Dublin. This time, though, they spent almost twice as long in the studio. What did that mean? Well, for example on the swelling, sweltering No Rivers Around Here, Daniels Fox and O’Kelly decided to go for lunch together, leaving Kilian in the studio alone, playing on a loop for about an hour straight. If it sounds cruel, it worked — he landed on a series of takes that Fox reversed and spliced together. Daniel O’Kelly is quick to praise his younger brother. “My favourite parts of the studio sessions are when we record Kilian on the guitar or piano. It’s a real joy just watching him play and effortlessly transpose the melodies in his head onto an instrument.”
Peadar Kearney is the other guitarist in Silverbacks and is key to defining the sound of the album’s opening track and lead single, Selling Shovels. Getting guitar feedback like that heard in the bridges and outro is an artform that Peadar has mastered. The band’s twin/triple-threat guitarmony runs through these 11 songs, from the Cory Hanson-influenced noodles of Look At All You’ve Done to the swells of Billion Star Night Light.
Some seven years into Silverbacks, they say definitively that this is what they sound like. What they want to sound like. “A lot of the songs are new, but the album reminds me of the times Kilian and I spent in the garage as teenagers writing songs together and imagining what our band could achieve,” says Daniel. “It reminds me of the first few gigs we played with Peadar and Emma in Maynooth.
“Fad and Archive Material naturally drew a lot of comparisons to the post-punk scene. But I never saw those albums in that way. But I sometimes felt the people coming to our shows and the press we got came to see us for those comparisons. Now that Easy Being A Winner is coming out, I feel I can more confidently say who we are. We’re indie rock. And this album sounds even more like the indie rock I imagined for our band all those years ago.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the likes of My Bloody Valentine and Guided By Voices are mentioned as influences. They also love Stereolab, a key touchstone for the aforementioned Something I Know. The drumbeat by Gary Wickham, who Daniel met for the first time at a Wilco gig, is intricate on this one and carries the song beautifully. Cult Irish band Rollerskate Skinny, indie legends Yo La Tengo, and Mercury Rev are all cited, as is an interesting name: Nick Cave. Daniel says he took some lyrical inspiration from his engagement with religion and imagery, while Kilian says of Giving Away An Inch Of: “This one is a love song and mostly about the balance of relationships. The main idea was that one of the lovers was going to be pleading for a little bit more compromise from their other half. I wanted to have lots of ties to nature too and I think Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds version of Nature Boy played a part there.”
Paris is, of course, another big presence in Daniel’s lyrics. No Rivers Around Here is about trying to fit into a neighbourhood, and feeling torn about the changes that are likely to happen to the area in the coming years. Elsewhere lie references to what he saw from his window on Gare du Nord, where he lived opposite a sex shop. Though Daniel’s lyrics are often wry, they’re like diary entries too. Take Flex, for example, a song that starts out on a gentle acoustic guitar riff that quickly escalates. “This song was written shortly after our small U.S. tour, and the three weeks I spent in the States,” he explains. “The pace and size of the U.S. reminded me of the Scalextric tracks and the ad packaging they used to have in the ’90s.” Penultimate track Songs About Divide is the most mellow of the collection, a bittersweet song about loneliness and lacking a sense of belonging to any one place.
It takes confidence to admit such feelings. In Easy Being A Winner, Silverbacks have made their best album yet. It exudes confidence.”
