Cardinals (The 'So Young' Tour)
Cardinals are a band that will lift you one minute, release you the next, but will leave you feeling alive.
Whilst Birmingham indie band Overpass were packing in the punters downstairs at the Adrian Flux Waterfront on Thursday night, I opted to join the audience upstairs in the Studio for an evening hosted by music magazine and record label So Young. Founded in 2014 by Sam Ford and Josh Whettingsteel, So Young launched just as Camden-based music and gig guide The Fly was ceasing publication after more than fifteen years of being distributed free of charge to venues and bars across the country. Available as both a print edition and online, So Young has since published over 50 issues, and is this month celebrating with a series of gigs, beginning in Bristol and ending in London, featuring Irish bands Cardinals and Pebbledash, and South London five piece Mên An Tol. Norwich was city number three on the tour and, for all three bands, it was their first time playing here.
Opening band Pebbledash, a five-piece shoegaze/alt-rock outfit featuring the bewitching vocals of singer Asha Ega McCutcheon, is the first of two bands on tonight’s bill to hail from Cork. Their opening song, Killer Lover, builds slowly and has a style that reminds very much of early Radiohead. By way of contrast, Carraig Aonair (literally The Long Rock), with which Killer Lover was jointly released last year as a single, is much more in the Irish folk tradition of sean-nós, and is filled with dark melancholy, melodic soundscapes, and themes of grief and loss. With a line-up that includes Fionnbharr Hickey on guitar, Jack Cashman on five-string bass, Cormac Donovan O’Neill on keys, and Eoin Schuch on drums, Pebbledash are a very polished and impressive opening act.
Meanwhile, South London band Mên-an-Tol (who take their name from a famous set of Cornish standing stones near Penzance) fuse folk with indie and Britpop influences. Again, they have a five-piece line-up, and it is the vocals of Bill Jefferson that delivers their poetic style of songwriting, creating energy and excitement whilst promoting the beauty of rurality and praising the comforts of home. Their set includes the recent single NW1, described as ‘a tipsy stroll through Camden’, and which received airplay on BBC 6 Music. And it is always a pleasure to listen to an indie band that has a dedicated mandolin player (Felix Knox) in the line-up.
Headliners, Cardinals, also from Cork, are an alternative noise-pop band featuring the guitar and vocals of Euan Manning. Their music has been described as having the ‘atmospheric bluster’ of Echo and The Bunnymen and the ‘scratchy indie’ of Yo La Tengo but, for me, it was the almost telepathic connection between Euan and his brothers Finn on accordion and Darragh on drums that gave the band a real sense of Gaelic cohesion. With a mix of fizzy pop tunes infused with folk sentimentality, songs of hope and loss, and tales of love and failure, Cardinals really hit the emotional hammers in the way that bands like Villagers always did so well. However, despite the angst of songs like Twist And Turn, the moodiness of Roseland, and the grandiosity of Big Empty Heart, it was the heartfelt gentleness of their closing song, the beautiful I Could Make You Care, that almost had me choking back the tears. Cardinals are a band that will lift you one minute, release you the next, but will leave you feeling alive.
