Thread Pulls Video + Interview

My favourite track from New thoughts, Thread Pulls' excellent debut album from last year, gets the Jacques Cousteau treatment.



Here's what I thought about the album when it came out in September 2010.

Thread Pulls - New thoughts (Osaka Records)
The last thing I see myself as is a cheerleader for the "Irish music industry" (TM). However, this feels like an important Irish rock album at the beginning of a new decade. The fact that this Dublin band consists of nothing but a bass player and a drummer (with a few electronics worked in) compounds the feeling of a new template. Thread Pulls have taken out cymbals, synths and guitars, all the better to highlight the power of drum and bass. Why is this album important? Because it's full of catchy tunes with a powerful punch that you can dance to (my own favourite, and one of the songs of the year, is Weight, with its floppily insistent post punk rhythm interspersed with drum flurries and a sweetly melodic, almost new wave, breakdown). In a major departure for a Dublin band, Thread Pulls also patently do not take themselves too seriously. Fuck the Irish music industry, do your record collection a favour and get this.

And when they played in Cork last September, I interviewed Peter and Gavin, who make up the band, a chat which featured talk of influences from The Specials to Krautrock, the practice of improvisation and collaboration, moving from a three-piece to a two-piece band, developing live performance, their debut album New thoughts, circuit diagrams, and more.


The interview was conducted in the salubrious suroundings of the snug in the Long Valley Bar, around the corner from where the band played later that night, at the Triskel Substation building on Caroline St, as part of the rhizomes Tour with Thulebasen and Patrick Kelleher.

The gig itself was a thing of great power and beauty. The industrial, warehouse setting of the Substation venue seemed to suit Thread Pulls' music - stripped back, bare-to-the-bone, oddly compelling rhythms (one of the current, very vogueish, genre tags, post-wave, a meld of post-punk and new-wave, might even be appropriate as a description). Because the three bands were several dates into their tour, something of a party atmosphere also prevailed (added to by the BYO beer cans in the audience). I must say it was endearing to see art rock interpreted with a smile on its face. Highlights for me were album standouts These new thoughts and Weight, with its fantastic drum flurries. Incidentally, Thulebasen were also highly enjoyable, in a deeply proggy, but again playful way, as was Patrick Kelleher, like some 80's goth/electro-pop wonder gone (wrong) right. All in all, a great night and an encouraging picture of Irish (and Danish, I suppose, in the case of Thulebasen) alternative rock in 2010.


UOH Thread Pulls Interview by underground of happiness

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