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FIRST REVIEW OF DEBUT EP!! by Robert Doyle of Babylon Radio " Strange Sounds"
Like the aristo-mystical sect that gave them the latter half of their name, Dublin city's Fredrick and the Golden Dawn were forged in a crucible of deeply felt lack, of hunger unfed. A century or so ago, from the ghettos and umbra of the towering, self-assured, but false utopia of mechanistic materialism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn launched an insurrection in the name of the human spirit, through their quest to discover the the numinous, the hidden, the awe-inspiring and the unspeakable, behind the veil of supposed certainties that the age smugly accepted as Final Truth. And now, at the beginning of the third millennium, on a smaller scale though driven by no less keen a yearning, a garage noir band named Fredrick and the Golden Dawn wage their own jihad of the spirit, against the orthodoxy of banality and slapdash inconsequentiality that is the creative milieux in which they find themselves.
Fredrick and the Golden Dawn don't fit in. Not in Dublin and not in Ireland. For years, local music has been constrained, in both style and substance, by provincialism, a too-cool-for-art-school name-checking cosiness, and, above all, by servility before a despotism of tiresomely 'tasteful' restraint. Not so Fredrick and the Golden Dawn. In style and substance, this band is a seething cauldronful of the literary, the theatrical, and the gothically flamboyant, seasoned with a smattering of infernal burlesque.
Summoning the muses of Leonard Cohen and Bertolt Brecht, Ute Lemper and Lotte Lenya the Golden Dawn mystify and bewitch with ballads of doomed love, wailed out into endless indifferent night by whiskey-lashed wretches, whilst making erratic yet potent essays into the jag and pummel of elaborate math-rock. Meanwhile, singer Kevin Nolan flits mercurially between numerous alter-ego roles; the soft-toned harmoniser, looking out dispassionately over the detritus of broken love and blue murder in 'Splinter'; the boozy wound nurser of 'Blood Wedding', howling from the dregs of the heart, then menacingly exhorting his betrayer to 'sleep with one eye open'; and the bright-eyed romantic of the wonderful 'The Guess', who mutates mid-song into a hoarse and raging prophet, growling his enigmatic truths across a pitiless earth: 'Dark is the counsel of man, for man is master of the Guess'.
Fredrick and the Golden Dawn will compel, confound, startle, stir, and possibly even infuriate. In a musical desert of ambitionless post-rock tedium, politely futile muso noodlings, and an all-round ambiance of trendy drabness and pedestrianism, there's not much more that could be hoped for than that.
- Robert Doyle of Babylon Radio " Strange Sounds"
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