The PVP: The cost-of-living and housing crisis are really putting a stranglehold on arts, art events and arts participation
An interview with Limerick back the Personal Vanity Project about their self-titled debut album and Winter Aid is on TPOE 312 talking about second LP Pull the Sky Inside
Limerick trio The Personal Vanity Project (The PVP) are Brendan McInerney (drums), James Reidy (keyboards) and Chris Quigley (guitar, vocals). They released their self-titled debut album on May 24. Nine tracks long, it’s hard not to use ‘shoegaze’ as the catch-all term for their sound but it’s really infectious - they say they combine a love of Suicide, Stereolab and Sonic Youth in a blur of psychedelia-infused indie rock. They explain: “The original premise for the project was based on a rumoured Kevin Shields drum and bass record. Chris elected to begin trying to combine shoegazey fuzz guitar with DnB. While this was, in his words ‘a total disaster’, those demos began to steer in the direction of something novel. Recruiting Brendan and James, a group vision began to form, combining drum machines, drums, synth and guitar in a refreshing take on the psych and shoegaze style. Focusing on melodic lines and eschewing chord progressions, their palette shifted away from the binary of drones and chords for something that felt fresh.”
The PVP play Galway’s Róisín Dubh on Friday, June 14. Listen to their album below - and buy it here on Bandcamp - and you can read an interview with Chris below.
You guys all play in other bands - Chris Quigley (Cruiser), Brendan McInerney (Bleeding Heart Pigeon) and James Reidy (His Father's Voice) (and maybe more besides?). How did ye come together to make music and was there a certain sound ye had in mind that ye weren't making with your 'other' bands?
I think we definitely do explore stuff we didn't in other projects, but that's less from a deliberate stylization and maybe just a result of the jumping off point. There's a mutual admiration for certain music where the minimalism is what makes the music feel really immediate, so a small band made sense. In terms of how we started, I think I just had some music and asked the guys would they like to work on stuff together – there was no real expectation of anything. Cruiser being on hiatus since 2019 meant I had been writing music but had no outlet for it. Some of these early demos would turn into tracks that became songs like ‘Callan’ and ‘Sodium Lamp’, and as we became a more comfortable performing group I began to write in a less structured manner and just bring the ideas to the group. The aim is to be exploratory for ourselves, and I think that's whats interesting for everyone. Currently we're touring a song we haven't actually sat down to finish writing and so we're just letting the gigs inform what becomes of it. That feels very authentic for us.
I don't usually ask acts where their name came from but The Personal Vanity Project sounds like there's a good story behind it...
The war against self-induced slacker irony, I'm afraid. All art is a vanity project, and in times of distress it can feel like a petty little luxury you're affording yourself while the world burns. I guess when I began I was feeling a bit fatalist about my own art making, and I was trying to leverage that into a form of freedom by making that feel grandiose in some way. Sometimes feeling like no one cares is can be liberating.
Did it come together quite quickly? There were two singles in March and April and then the full album in May. Sometimes it can take acts years to get around to a debut album.
Reasonably quickly, I would say. We were writing the album on and off over a year and recorded it in a few months with Chris Ryan - which was great. It's my first time not making a record live within the context of my own music. In things like Cruiser, we'd a more frantic approach and we would record handfuls of songs and throw them online to no fanfare and be squirreling away on the next thing before the first one had been out. I would write, record, mix and release in the space of a few months - I think we did like an EP and two singles (with B-sides) in one year and started demoing an album by November that year. While we worked pretty fast for most bands, it was novel for me to be able to take a breath while working.
The press release says: "The original premise for the project was based on a rumoured Kevin Shields drum n bass record, with Chris electing to begin trying to combine shoegazey fuzz guitar with DnB. This was a total disaster." How long did this idea last? Do you think there's a thin line between drum n bass and making the kinda guitar music you settled on?
All that was left after probably three months of lockdown writing the worst acid basslines you've ever heard was a big fat zero. I'm actually kind of sad I've deleted those demos. But in the spirit of rumoured but non-existent MBV records, maybe I did complete the project? Maybe that's the truest emulation. I think the strongest connection between those two is that 'Tomorrow Never Knows' wannabe that the Chemical Brothers do on a lot of their records. They're pretty cool songs usually - but we don't do that.
Shoegaze seems to be going through a moment right now. Do you find yourselves listening to the new acts doing it (for example, Galway's NewDad) or do you go back to the early 90s stuff more for inspiration?
I think we have all collectively overexposed ourselves to a lot of the 90s stuff. I really enjoy certain bands' interpolation of those ideas (The Altered Hours would be a great example), but I'm not really that obsessed with that aesthetic like I was as a teenager. We all like lots of stuff - James is a huge Protomarytr fan, Brendan seems to always have Mount Kimbie on in his car and I'm currently back on an Unwound kick. But anything goes - I've bought a vocoder and am trying to shoehorn it into the next batch of songs currently. We're more excited by pushing things where we can.
One thing I often come to as a question is whether shoegaze is even a genre? I suppose I only like a couple of the 'golden era' bands to begin with. I saw Acid Mothers Temple a couple of weeks ago and they covered Terry Riley's In C mid set. It was unbelievably cool, really heavy and refreshing to see a Psych Rock band tackle something that conceptual. I think we're closer to AMT than Ride in terms of aesthetic, but then we're not really in terms of genre. It confuses the life out of me, clearly.
I enjoyed your video for 'Callan'. Were ye in the cold, mucky field for hours or was it one take and done?
Oh god, yeah it was quite a few hours in the muck I believe? Brendan picked the location and he spent the longest in it so I can't complain. I think we did a day in that field back in February with Graham Patterson, and it was quite fun by memory. It's on the side of a quarry so Brendan's snare sounded crazy, there was this really long echo happening. Second half was filmed a month or so later in with Cat's oil projector set up. It's all Brendan being in this loop, and the mechanical nature of drumming: he's our 'Mensch-Maschine'.
I love the reverb going through 'Track 94'. Tell me about making that one.
Most of the effects on the album are performed and this is probably the most prominent example. Chris Ryan had recently gotten a Roland Space Echo and we were just doing dub echo all over the album. He suggested I perform the vocal echos, so he hit play and I began swapping quickly between the heads, which created the effect of rapidly changing the length of the echo which was really interesting in the context of the music. We did a handful of takes this way, and then a few more with the vocals running backwards, creating the reverse echo effects. He chopped it all up and took the best bits and you get this real swampy thing where the vocals feel unstuck from time in some way. Really reminds me of Confusion is Sex era Sonic Youth. Kim's a big influence on this track, so it feels fitting.
How does the lyric writing work? Do you enjoy it? You say there are "themes of environmental disaster and loss alternating with tales of hipster burnout" across the album. Did they only become evident afterwards?
Totally underwritten, I barely write words most of the time. Brendan thought he was singing along to a song for about four weeks when he asked me for lyrics and I told him there were none. It's either totally subconscious driven and I piece together the lyrics that have formed while performing, or I get really high-minded and write from some conceptual angle. Fundamentally it's all post rationalisation, I didn't know what I wanted to sing about until I had already sung it and then I had to see how I felt about it later. There's references to a couple of books there – ‘The Bus’ borrows some of the idioms of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but that's about all I'll admit to.
I can't help but think of Kelly Clarkson when listening to 'Since You've Been Gone' even though I know it's not a cover. But it does stand out on the collection, maybe it's the most melodic song of the nine here. Did it stand out to ye when making it?
I get this once a week currently and honestly, fair. It's even a similar rhythm. I was tempted to change the words, but I felt like becoming self conscious and responding to the work and legacy of Kelly Clarkson was actually the lamest thing to do and I'd rather just take the flak. It's what my brain landed on, what can I do?
Closing track 'Swimming' features spoken-word lyrics, a changeup from what's gone before. Was that just something you wanted to try?
Pretty much. It's kind of funny – we all know the UK indie scene rapidly cycles through its newest trend, and one of them during the writing of this album was spoken-word indie rock bands. I was actually super self-conscious about ‘Off The Tracks’, ‘Track 94’ and ‘Swimming’ in case people felt we were attempting to emulate that trend. Again I didn't want to be reacting to this stuff but basically yeah - I'm not much of a singer, let's try talking.
I know ye've just released your debut album but have you thought about what's next already? Do you have many plans ahead?
We’re just enjoying touring the record at this moment, playing the shows and having fun with the music. We've been writing material and as I said earlier we're trying to incorporate it into the tour at the moment. Keep on keepin' on.
Limerick musicians are probably tired of being asked about the scene in the city, but it feels like it's been particularly buoyant for a good few years now. Does it still feel as vibrant on the inside as it looks on the outside?
It’s all what you make of it, really. I think the whole island is booming creatively, it's just how that manifests is quite geographically dependent. Of course here in LK we have a lot of great artists, but also whole new peer groups setting up new art spaces, online communities and running art events. By contrast there’s specific difficulties each community have, and there would be real merit to bringing these communities together to discuss it in some way. The PVP are all involved in Féile na Gréine to some capacity and it gives you a sort of broad view of what's happening in the city, and what issues are commonly popping up. Limerick’s issues to me are fairly urban in nature and largely based around city livability and capacity – can we get into a space? Can we fund it? Can we live near where we intend to work?
I’m writing this the day before our mayoral election so you’ll have to forgive my annoying Bob Geldof moment: I feel It’s really worth stating how the cost-of-living and housing crisis are really putting a stranglehold on arts, art events and arts participation. New artists who are participating skew to the urban born, younger people are struggling to afford attending events, the overall pot of people who participate in the city’s night culture is really quite small. It’s a common sentiment for those living here I'm sure: the people here are great, but it feels like the decision making is not made by people who see the city as a place to live and it can be frustrating to watch. I think the appetite for direct democracy, as narrow as it was, came from a frustration with the existing process.
The underlying issues are not unique to Limerick of course, I’m seeing people relocate and withdraw across the country from participation in the arts due to a variety of issues: hyper-inflation, housing scarcity, the rise of the far-right. It’s all a bit fucked when you have Niall Boylan running for MEP and not getting laughed out of it.
And finally, what's your favourite song by an Irish artist right now?
Loads of great Irish artists after recently releasing work – pôt-pot, His Father’s Voice, Danny Carrol, Of All Living Things, girlfriend. The Litany of Failures is one of the true artifacts of the Irish music scene, and from that I think ‘Nids Niteca’ by Junk Drawer is our personal favourite.
TPOE 312: Winter Aid
Shane Culloty aka Winter Aid released his second album Pull the Sky Inside on May 17 and talked through the album on episode 312 of the TPOE podcast. You can listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts - just search for The Point of Everything. Here’s a little snippet from the chat.
Track three is called 'Mother Jones'. Pretty heavy guitar on this track. Was that a natural thing to do? You talked about, was it being more ambitious or less ambitious on this album? Is that something that you feel in this song?
I was trying to keep things more direct, and not get carried up in how to dress up songs more. So like, I think 'Mother Jones' is a good example. It's very focused around one guitar riff, which is not the kind of thing I would usually write. And it's very simple, very, very simple. I think before, I wouldn't have had enough confidence to hang an entire song around what is basically one little hook. And the chorus is pretty good as well. But like, it's very simple that it can be pretty much reduced down to bashing away on one guitar with one set of vocals, which I think beforehand, like that kind of thing, I would have felt the need to put more work into it and to make it a bit more impressive in different ways. Whereas with something like that I was more interested in just keeping it as close to that initial spark of inspiration as possible.
Where does that idea of feeling the need to do these kinds of different sounds come from? Is it just [because of] your prior releases, like 'The Wisp Sings', which has garnered over a million streams on Spotify? Is there a pressure that you're thinking about in terms of like, these are the songs that might have been expected of you?
I think to be simple, like Yeah, to be redundant about it. I feel like at the start, I didn't really feel like a musician. I always had what Tiktok would call imposter syndrome. I kind of felt like I had to be more advanced in my songwriting. When I ignored that, I would end up with a song like 'The Wisp Sings', which doesn't even really have a chorus or anything, it doesn't really have a structure I can defend, or would choose to write a song along because it's just a little bit cobbled together, but it also works quite well. And I think that was the good thing about seeing 'The Wisp Sings' take off, it felt a bit like, Oh, I've been overthinking this, I can keep things simple. For me, the best part of writing a song is when it sort of hits you out of nowhere, and you spend the first few hours trying to capture it. The downside, especially with me - where I do like all of my writing, basically, in my own head, without collaborators, just like in front of a computer or keyboard with headphones on - is you can just get stuck there and keep adding layer after layer, or keep trying new things. If you give into that impulse too much, you kind of stray away from the initial spark, so 'Mother Jones' was something where I think I very intentionally stopped writing on the second day I was working on it. I just sort of said, I'm not adding anything else new. And I think I took off a bunch of guitar stuff that I had added. So it really is like just that one riff and the chorus. And yeah, I hope it works.
Do you feel like a musician now?
Yeah, I do. And it's a funny thing to think about because I don't know what exactly I was waiting for that would allow me to say that. I think, like you say, 'The Wisp Sings' has done quite well. And I was really proud of it. When I released it, I knew people would like it. And people did like it. And that was very different from what ended up happening, which was, you know, it's been like, played billions of times, across platforms. And I get messages on a daily basis that are very, very deep and sincere. I think getting stuff like that for over a year made me feel a bit more confident about my songwriting.