Popular legend has it that the sound of Jamaican ska originated from bands trying to copy the pop music they heard on short wave radio from America. Add a dash of inspiration and all of a sudden there was a whole new sound. Radio reception in Cork is no doubt a lot better than in Jamaica in the ’60s, but The Shanks’ debut album almost has that same quality.
‘Brang’, in effect, is a re-assemblage of songs heard on John Peel’s ‘Festive 50’ skewed into something that you could almost define as a unique sound. Like their predecessors on the Cork pop scene, Microdisney and even The Frank And Walters, The Shanks somehow sound far removed from the prevailing winds of their pop contemporaries. At its most peculiar, on the didgeridoo-led ‘Crystal Clear’, The Shanks are like Gastr Del Sol with a Chieftains fixation, but even in their more lucid moments like on the brilliantly Fall-ish ‘Babbling’, they’re still fairly deranged.
This, then, is the sound of low-key genius working in isolation, and while there’s almost too many ideas at work to allow ‘Brang’ to work as a coherent whole, The Shanks have joined the dots of modern pop together to create an ingeniously perverse picture.