It would appear that Hal could well be the new Dodgy. Apart from the fact that they do sound like the twee 90s hippie popsters to a degree, and share their unblinkered musical optimism, we can see this band being plastered all over the outdoor stages at this summer’s festivals, harvesting a few I’m-yer-behst-mate style mass-singy-songs and splitting opinion right down the middle. Of course in their more immediate surroundings they’re having a go at grabbing the new The Thrills tag, who were themselves kind of the new Dodgy for a while last summer even though they wanted to be the new Stones, and we wouldn’t exactly be upset to see them replaced, their second album did fall kind of flat. The Irish nationality obviously underlines comparisons here, but so does the music. So, are we in Cork or California? It’s a tricky one.
‘Worry About The Wind’ sounds like The Bee Gees doing a ballad for Grease and is a good enough lead off for talking about the album. There are melodies you could drown in here, serious bang on target stuff that only brothers could create, reaching a shelf The Bluetones were always too short-arsed to get to. But it’s all so spic and span, it’s all so very very earnest. It comes from a place that you can’t ever imagine existing, but if you wanted to hide amid the clichéd perfections of a long gone era these are your boys. And admittedly ‘Play The Hits’, ‘Don’t Come Running’ and the Simon & Garfunkel-esque ‘Love Is Your Golden Rule’ are massive, corking tunes. There’s a glut of maudlin moping, but even those tend to find a smattering of gold in the end.
So it’s a little bit La’s, a little bit Teenage Fanclub, but more The Monkees, quite a lot like the Bay City Rollers in fact, a little bit “whoaa” but certainly not ever even a little bit “weeeay”. It’s achingly twee, well-behaved, cardboard-cutout, pure-at-source, untainted pop music that keeps its teeth really nice and bloody clean. The Americans would be pleased, and probably will be. It’s the sort of thing you could fashion a wholesome TV series from and not have one corner of the professionally reactive moral evangelical far-right forming a single focus group about it. It’s so retro that it’s practically anti-modern. In fact thinking about it, it could be the work of the professionally reactive moral evangelical US far-right. Careful, kids. Things aren’t always as they seem.