John Duignan and Conall Ó Breacháin are friends with a love of music.
By Colleen Taylor
Recent online polls show “We Cut Corners,” a musical duo from Dublin, released one of Ireland’s favorite albums of 2016. The popularity of this third album, entitled “The Cadences of Others,” marks a trend among young music fans in Ireland. Like many other popular groups in Ireland today—acts like Kodaline or singer Wallis Bird—We Cut Corners signifies an emerging category of what I might title “electro-melancholia.” Not all their songs are sad, of course, but there’s a pensive quality to these groups’ reverbs and percussion: it’s rock-pop in a minor key. The album “The Cadences of Others,” in particular, sounds like modernized nostalgia. So what would make this album one of the most favored of 2016? The more I’ve learned about We Cut Corners, the more I suspect the secret behind their fandom can be traced to their ambitious simplicity.
We Cut Corners started out as—and, in many ways, remain—two guys with two instruments. The roots of this music are simply a guitar, a drum, and two friends with a love of music. John Duignan and Conall Ó Breacháin spent the early years of their career playing gigs in pubs in Dublin, focusing on their songwriting craft. In 2011, they released their debut album, “Today I Realized I Could Go Home Backwards,” which they followed with “Think Nothing” in 2014. By 2016, Dunigan and Ó Breacháin were steady fixtures in modern Irish music, and as responses this past year evince, their work continues to please listeners. Their origin story and their continued dedication to the simplicity of two instruments and two harmonious voices suggests that anyone’s musical point of view might be worthy of an original songwriting career. It’s like the American Dream for young music fans—if you and a friend give it a try, really dedicate, then who’s to say you can’t make influential music the world wants to hear? These two men had the audacity to try, and that strength ended in success.
Nevertheless, I admit, I had trouble getting into “The Cadences of Others.” I wanted to understand what made this group tick for fans, but I found myself switching to other artists, other favorite albums, as I listened through the album. That is, until I hit the song “Of Whatever.” This subdued, gorgeous and elegiac track finally caught my attention. Not only is this ballad a stunning mixture of electro and standard Dylan-esque folk, but its lyrics speak to its listener. Some words remained in my head throughout that day, such as: “Did I just imagine it, or have we grown so dispassionate?...The wave of whatever is sweeping the nation.” We Cut Corners engage with and investigate our modern culture with simple music and complex, poetic lyricization. The words are dark, even despairing at times, but they resonate, and clearly, they stick.
As much as I admire their lyrics, I believe We Cut Corners can push themselves further musically. To my ears, they sound too generic—too run-of-the-mill indie pop or electro rock. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think a band with the songwriting skills of these two Dublin musicians might benefit from looking inward and backward in history, rather than upward at the pop music charts or the latest electro fads. Perhaps this is my small, music-critic version of Yeats telling Synge to go to Aran, but I think what We Cut Corners needs is the inflection of their own national tradition. I’m not saying the band needs to transform into a fully-fledged traditional folk group, but influences like Tommy Makem, Andy Irvine, or even someone more contemporary like Eleanor McEvoy might prove more fruitful in influence than the duo’s current model, Vampire Weekend. Who’s to say even the most modern and current of artists can’t draw energy from the past? After all, Swift's "Battle of the Books" proved there’s do difference between the ancients and the moderns anyway. A little tradition could lead We Cut Corners and other young, hip groups like them to new musical heights. Give them a listen yourself and see what you think. For more information: wecutcorners.net.
