Hard Working Class Heroes '08

Oxegen and Electric Picnic are all very well if you're into that kind of thing (by which I mean standing around shivering in the mud to catch a few minutes of the same old bands from across a field of equally muddy people), but there are few music festivals, if any, quite like Hard Working Class Heroes. Instead of serving itself or the monster we deride and rally against as the "industy", it serves Irish musicians: providing a platform and an audience (and of course media attention) to the country's most promising upcoming bands, making it probably the world's only festival where you don't need to be a success before you play at it, but most likely will be afterwards. What's more it does so economically - you don't even need a tent, just a LUAS ticket, and you get to spend most of your time indoors. You get a lot of bands for your money, and from an observer's point of view, shows which way the wind is blowing in Irish music (cf. the proliferation of electronic-based bands over the last few years). And it's always so lovably modest about it all.

Last week the Hard Working Class Heroes crew announced the Irish bands who will be joining the Scottish ambassadors of this year's invasion. However, this year - it's sixth year running - HWCH is facing a number of problems. After the opposition it faced last year at having all gigs take place in the POD complex, HWCH has returned to Temple Bar. Whether this is a good decision remains to be seen, as while the POD complex had the advantage of having a number of stages in one area, Temple Bar trumps it for variety and informality. Logistically similar, preference will likely be a matter of taste rather than logic. The second problem facing this year's festival is the Dublin Fringe Festival, taking place 6th - 21st of September (and interestingly being handled by the same PR company, Friction), which is posing a challenge to the HWCH by hosting some interesting Irish-band gigs of their own across the same weekend in the famed Spiegeltent. This year's Hard Working Class Heroes will have to work hard to get their audience, but half newbies, half usual suspects, it's one not to be missed.

Bands to watch: HWCH '08

• Hybrasil: been around a while, but getting better all the time
  

• Crayonsmith - released one of the best albums of the year so far.
  

• Le Galaxie - arisen from the ashes of the beautiful and brilliant 66e, they're doing their best to shake the association by pressing buttons and twiddling knobs. But they do it well.
  

• Not Men But Giants - more strange electronica

• Grand Pocket Orchestra - not quite an orchestra, but cute and lovable, and probably the only band that can pull off a song about odd socks

• Super Extra Bonus Party - winners of this year's Choice Award and the missing link between club and rock. A live sensation of the kind rarely seen anymore.
  

• The Kinetiks - apparently the cutting edge in Irish indie, about to take over the world any minute now (and they know it too)

• Autamata - so innocently likeable, and on their third album, hardly new to this. Brilliantly unpredictable.

• Halves - beautifully and expansively filling the gap left by Butterfly Explosion and 66e. Otherwise know as the Irish Sigur Ros.

• The Dagger Lees - used to be Stagger Lee. Enough said.

• The Ambience Affair - a loop-based two piece that though in early days, could develop into something truly interesting.

• Exit: Pursued By A Bear - the winners in the best name category, though it's not as if they need the extra attention: more floaty electronic/rock mixes, but utterly absorbing.

• The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock - the obligatory trad mix, this time a really unusual trad-meets-16 Horsepower-meets-heavy rock.

• The Cades - swinging rock that's impossible to resist.

• Robotnik - a one-man lo-fi/pop powerhouse that deserves to rub shoulders with his extensive list of influences.
  

Headliners and schedules to be announced soon at http://www.hwch.net/.

YAMBlog

Contacts, a.k.a. Yes, Another Music Blog. Another load of self-absorbed, pretentious articles by a wannabe and/or failed journalist, bemoaning the state of current journalistic standards and publications that won't let them write what they want to write, as ever making the mistake that journalism is a means of personal self-expression as they wait to be talent-spotted. Will this one be any different? This writer is no more funny, talented or even readable than others, and there are some extremely talented music bloggers out there. She has worked as a journalist for some prominent Dublin publications and loved it. So why Contacts? Because, she's in Boston, not doing any writing, and honestly, kind of bored.

Journalism, while by it's nature requiring some sort of personal abilities, insights and subjective criticism, is not a means of self-expression. It is a job: a journalist's responsibility is to analyse (admittedly this analysis will be subject to their own insight and understanding) and present information, whether it be an album review or war feature, to the public, and not at every opportunity to present their own selves. Here is where the problem with modern Irish, if not international, music journalism currently lies, a problem which internet blogging is perpetuating, not circumventing.

This and more. After criticising her band in a review, I recently received an unpleasant, if not downright abusive, email from an irate singer, accusing me of ignorance and, well, general crapness, and foretelling my doomed future as a journalist and musician. Hey maybe I was wrong, maybe I simply misunderstood all her ripped-off riffs and posing, but the question I have been trying to answer since - apart from where the hell she got my address - is whether this hostility was borne of a genuine belief that her music was above honest, even adding the buzz-word, constructive criticism, or was she just so insulated from flak by the blanket positivism of the Irish media, where such criticism no longer really exists, and everybody tries encourage the "new Irish band". And this is the nub of the problem. Irish popular music journalism is almost lacking critical and analytical thought, overwhelmed as it is by personalising journalists trying to get their word in edgeways, and sometimes, just sometimes, even currying favour with their biased editors (no names please).

There has always been a divide between journalism and musicology, and probably rightly so. Most casual readers and music fans are probably not that interested in reading, say, a 10,000 word study of the ancient crumhorn, but that doesn't mean journalism, ever the priest brother to the doctor musicology, cannot learn from critical theory and analysis. A popular music or casual classical fan is entitled as much as a high-art scholar to read a proper serious analysis or critique of what they are listening to. While internet-based sites are more adventurous in this regard, print and broadcast media have still to catch up. Of course, not all music fans are interested in this critical thinking, and light music journalism, the fashion and charts and funny side of the industry, is just as necessary. The point is choice, and that is what's lacking.

Contacts is about making connections between the analytical methods of "high art" (an odious term) and the lighter journalism of pop art. The two needn't always be separate. So will Contacts be different from any of the other hundreds of music blogs lying around the internet waiting to be discovered. Probably not. Let's face it, it has already gotten off to a bad start, when the opening post is a pretentious condemnation of the standards of Irish journalism by a self-referencing wannabe journalist.

Keep reading.