Irish Timeswriters give their verdict.

Richmond Fontaine
Whelan's

Siobhán Long

Two-fifths of Glaswegian band The Endrick Brothers landed on stage on Friday, their mannered demeanour at odds with a forceful and quirky personality.

Lead singer Niall Holmes and guitarist Yorick Cormack (a dead ringer for The Band's Rick Danko) beckoned a world where gentle wordplay reigns supreme, soaring on the back of some of the best vocals we've encountered since Babybird.

Ballad For A Film and Beautiful Rejection, both postcards from their just-released second album Attraction Versus Love, hinted at a band with a swag load of original ideas and an ignition to match.

Somnolent, desert-parched music is what Richmond Fontaine trade in, an all-too-rare commodity in the music business these days. Willy Vlautin cuts it in the lead singer stakes like few others: literate, self-effacing and possessed a cut-glass voice to match his razor-edged pen.

With seven albums tucked beneath their nonexistent belts, Richmond Fontaine are a band whose boots are suitably scuffed and worn by endless road miles and Jim Jarmusch motel rooms and, one suspects, the occasional quart of pre-dawn whiskey.

The band traced a surreal map through a handful of regional (and to most of us, faceless) American cities, from Portland to Spokane, Phoenix, and Albuquerque, stopping by Stockton en route.

Vlautin treads that elusive fine line of tunefulness navigated so expertly by Lou Reed - only Vlautin does it with so much more humanity.

Recounting big, biblical tales swaddled in David Lynchian neighbourhood settings (I Fell Into Painting Houses in Phoenix, Arizona, 4 Walls), Richmond Fontaine's sound sits effortlessly on top of drummer Sean Oldham's disciplined rhythms and guest pedal steel guitarist and trumpeter Paul Brainard.

Dave Harding's bass lines are suitably low key, but Dan Eccles's guitar shadow boxes with Vlautin's vocals, coaxing and shading in all the right corners.

Inevitable comparisons with Calexico yield sharp contrasts, but this is a band which has burrowed deep beneath its own skin and emerged with darker, more soulful observations on life and the universe.

The Kid From Belmont Street is straight out of the Eels' world of damning self-doubt, but illuminated by a shaft of light that promises nothing more than another way of looking at the world. Capsized grinds its own diligent belief in a better way through a classic country rock prism. Delicious, defiantly life-affirming music made to linger.

How did we get Here?
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray

Michael Seaver

"Yes, you have come my audience, and that is enough for the most beautiful show on heaven and earth," sing Ciotóg's three performers with gusto during How did we get Here? Somewhere behind the insincere words of Tony Penultimate's song lies a truth, spoken through Ríonach Ní Néill's choreographed movements, that anything is possible every time we gather for theatrical rituals.

Dressed in jeans and pink hooded tops - worn back-to-front so that the raised hoods look like fencing masks - dancers Mike Carbery, Lisa McLoughlin and Fearghus Ó Conchúir slowly emerge from the auditorium.

White noise, almost like an untuned radio, mirrors our unfocused gaze, which gradually narrows to the stage as they pour onto the black floor chilled by a blue-wash of light.

Responding to opinions on what motivates people to share time together as audience and performers, Ní Néill creates a series of short interactions that resist pandering to expectations.

Instead we enter a more sophisticated conversation with a sharper language that lowers our expectations of digestible dance. So much so that when McLoughlin and Ó Conchúir prance coquettishly to Josephine Baker and The Comedian Harmonists' Espabilate, the reaction isn't amusement, but thin disappointment, and empathy to Carbery sitting glumly in the corner.

However, unstructured proceedings feel, a careful choreographic hand constantly rearranges images and movements that guide our eyes. Sinéad Wallace's thoughtfully-designed lighting maintains the ever-changing moods and she matches side-lights with costumes - pink at torso level and cool blue at the legs - to subtly accentuate the movement. Towards the end Mike Carbery imitates the domestic and financial dilemmas that might gnaw at a potential audience member attending the show, showing how fickle those decisions can often be.

How did we get Here? is inconclusive and doesn't provide any tidy answer to the question it poses. That would be letting us off the hook. Instead it is left to each individual to provide their own answer and engage at whatever level, whether the eager analyst or the bemused giggler.