Constellation Records’ Ought play The Workman’s Club with Jogging on November 17th
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Canadian-based diy arts advocaters ought are paying a visit to Dublin In November. The four men from Montreal are playing the Workman’s Club on November 17th as part of a whirwind 5 date tour of the UK and Ireland at the tail end of other European dates. Plenty of bands tour around record releases (or in Fugazi’s case consciously don’t tour around a record release) but Ought have brought it to another stage. They are promoting their new EP, Once More With Feeling, out on Constellation Records
The EP came about after what is described as an “an intense weekend session at Montréal’s Hotel2Tango in June 2014”. It yielded new recordings of two early pieces, “Pill” and “New Calm Pt. 2” along with the brand new, more experimental and largely instrumental “New Calm Pt. 3”. The final song on the ep is “Waiting” from their More Than Any Other Day sessions (debut Constellation Records offering released this year). It is a 24-minute, 10″ vinyl-only offering, suitably titled Once More With Feeling…
Clash Music describes the ep as “A four-track EP that runs for the best part of 25 minutes and possesses more depth, more intrigue, than most full-lengths running to twice as long”. The NME called it a “scattergun 24-minute journey, and its every destination is a delight.”
Musically Ought take post punk sounds of bands like Television and make it their own. Bits of The Fall may shout through but are brought to another level. Each track is more a composition rather than a straightforward song. They nurture and grow but always with an energy that encourages your aural participation. I’m sure live they will be a pleasure, so why don’t we find out together?
Ought
Jogging
The Workman’s Club
8pm, November 17th
Tickets are €12 (including booking fee) from http://www.tickets.ie.
“Ought has been burning with a strong and steady flame since flickering to life in Montreal in 2011. Holed up in a shared apartment that doubled as their rehearsal space, the four band members self-recorded a first EP and played their first show in these domestic confines, then busted out into the city’s loft circuit, and into the city streets during the Printemps d’Erable Quebec student general strike, in 2012. These inspired months of mass mobilization against neo-liberal austerity measures galvanized a wide and inspiring range of agit-prop expression in Montreal, and indelibly shaped the emerging sound, vision and social mandate of Ought. Guitarist/vocalist Tim Beeler, who previously had been writing poetry and folk music, drew new energy from electrification/amplification and from solidarity/protest alike; his declarative, observational vocal style ranges from wide-eyed to worried, but never submits to cool irony or emotional detachment. Ought’s earnest, stately and exuberant post-punk is dextrous, deliberate, unfussy and fluid, with debts to Cap’n Jazz, The Feelies, Lungfish, Gang Of Four and early Talking Heads, among many others. The band shifts from sharp angles and stuttering counterpoint to softer edges and chiming flow, with an economy of elements and fidelity to their basic 4-piece constitution. The instrumental interplay is consistently whipsmart, supple and deceptively simple. Beeler’s speak-singing can give way to melancholic melodic croons and ragged, desperate yelps, always driven by sincerity of feeling and connection to his subject matter, whether that’s the conundrum of our fractured interiority, or communion with others in our fractured social space – or, for the most part, both. Ought are a righteous and humble young band, fiercely dedicated to grassroots organizing and artmaking, taking as self-evident the inseparability of politics and aesthetics.
https://www.facebook.com/internetought
