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Monday, September 22, 2008
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Reviews
Current mood:  accomplished
Category: Writing and Poetry
Sunday Tribune Album of the Week:
Queen Kong V You're Only Massive
Dot-Dash (36:32)
Independent vinyl release
Here's a frighteningly exciting if strange prospect. Cork Berlinophiles Queen Kong, with their weird rock, and Waterford hip hop duo You're Only Massive (RIGHT), with their occasional party electro influence, have teamed up to make not a split album between bands, but a collaboration divided only by moods (one side "upbeat disco modern", the flip side "love songs and slow jams").
It takes a while to find a common thread between both acts, other than an endorsement of the avant-garde. Upon listening, that common thread reveals itself as an affection for beats, weirdness and, ultimately, melody. Dot-Dash' which could have been a disaster, delivers like no other Irish album has this year. It is just jammed with creativity, incredible vocal performances, smart raps, and inventive beats, sounds and rhythms, leaving you thankful that both groups came up with such a daring idea. Queen Kong's Amy Stephenson (LEFT) crowns the record with her irking and beautiful voice, most notably on 'The Rules' and 'Approximation', which also happens to be lyrically stunning, if peculiar ("The military lets you wear your own cosmetics / I wish I had a face like Samuel Beckett".) Every track is laden with surprises, from the urgent raps about shoplifting on 'Do A Runner' to the soaring Bond-like 'The World Is Yours'. Mixed continuously, Dot-Dash swerves around sounds expertly from hip hop to alt-rock, electro, indie and beyond, eventually becoming an eclectic and unusual entity of its own. One only wishes someone would throw a heap of cash at this record, to beef up the sound, and bulk up production values. With You're Only Massive's musical future hanging in the balance, Queen Kong should definitely maintain the direction in which they're going on Dot-Dash as it has yielded their best material ever. Recorded and produced in Dublin, Berlin, Waterford and Baltimore (US), Dot-Dash is a truly modern creation and one of the best Irish releases this year. It's hard to make the bizarre brilliant, but they've done it.
Download: 'Booty', 'Approximation', 'The Rules'
Una Mullally
August 17, 2008
The Ticket Album Reviews, The Irish Times:
YOU'RE ONLY MASSIVE VS QUEEN KONG
Dot-Dash ****
Self-release In the red corner, it's You're Only Massive, two lasses from Waterford who get their freak on with hip-hop and electro. In the blue corner, it's Queen Kong, Cork/Dublin musos with a grá for dark, tough sounds. With such a line-up, the Dot-Dash collaboration might well have been a dog's dinner, but it all turns out rather smashing in the mix. What's remarkable is the sense of cohesion throughout. Instead of merely accentuating and amplifying each side's strengths, common currency is found in the smart melodies, top-drawer beats and relentless wash of strange, alluring sounds. Both the collective's ambitious streak and a talent for hitting all the notes they're hearing in their heads are abundantly clear. From cheeky raps ( Do a Runner ) to perfectly realised sweeping grooves ( The World Is Yours ), Dot-Dash is light years ahead of what their peers are doing. www.myspace.com/youreonlymassive JIM CARROLL Dot Dash the album is currently available from
Road Records in Dublin,
All City in Dublin,
Plugd in Cork
BPM in Waterford
Passout Records in Brooklyn, NYC
and everywhere we are.
Live Review: ..tr>..table> ..tr>| you're only massive. | 85 days ago | | |  |  they are a really really good band. fucking amazing really. to be entirely frank. but yea, they missed their lift, got a bus, missed the connecting bus, (i think thats what happened anyway but yea), arrive to a pretty much deserted and smelly venue in a shitty lttle town (eire og, ennis), 6 hours late, AND STILL PLAYED THEIR ENTIRE SET. AND MANAGED TO GET THE CROWD DANCIN. ALL 10 OF US, MOST OF WHOM HAD BEEN THERE SINCE 11 O CLOCK THAT MORNING. aaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnndddddddd, they are all dead on. all 2 of them that got there. not even the entire band got there. but they still played. when we left they were lookin to see if they could get another gig round town.... i'm not sure if they did or not. but they're still legends. propa g.
a'ight. out. | | | | posted by Eoghan McMahon | ..table>
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The Lazarus Project
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Aleksandar Hemon
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Monday, December 17, 2007
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Interview with Mongrel Magazine and A Newspaper Article
Current mood: accomplished
If you don't have laser eyes, here is it all typed out:
Youre Only Massive
I know you are, but what am I?
Mongrel Issue 37, December 2007
Bubbly techno/hip-hop/pop duo You're Only Massive dropped by to talk DJing, hula hoops and the Leaving Cert.
So here's what I've never been able to figure out. Is your signature tune, Sugar Shake the Cool Away, pro- or anti-cool?
Megan: Anti-cool.
Maebh: Big time. It was written after the first gig we played together, which was in the Candlelight Sessions in Philly Grimes' pub in Waterford. It's a singer-songwriter night, mainly guys with guitars singing Beatles songs. No one danced or had any fun.
Because they were too cool?
Maebh: Yeah. Well it's the kinda place where everyone just sits and...
Megan: Quietly drinks their drinks.
Maebh: So if you've never performed before, and a load of people are staring blankly at you, it can be quite intimidating. Everyone's like (boring voice) Oh, I have to critique this...No, you don't. Enjoy yourself!
Maybe you were just shit.
(interviewer's phone goes off)
Maebh: (under her breat). So unprofessional.
Megan: I know. How embarassing...
Both: ...FOR HIM! (much hilarity)
At what stage did the hula-hoop come into the picture Maebh?
Megan: It was there from the beginning.
Maebh: Megan has a song that she does all by herself. I feel like a bit of a tool just standing there so I hula.
Right, cos you might look ridiculous otherwise.
Maebh: I'm pretty damn good at it. Of course, I'm wearing high heels so it's hard.
Do you ever worry you'll trip up?
Maebh: No. Well, you see, I spent about three weeks last year with nothing to do really other than hula-ing. I have very few skills. I have no musical skills, but I can hula-hoop.
How did you both meet?
Megan: It was last April. We'd just finished school...
I thought you were still in school, Megan?
I am. It was 4pm.
What was Maebh doing? Hanging around the school gates?
Maebh: Yeah, hula-ing! No, we've known each other for years. I've known her since she was eleven.
Megan: And once she heard my DJing skills, she couldn't stay away.
Megan, your MySpace page says you're the Young Poet of the Year 2007.
Megan: I am the Young Poet of the Year. I won a competition declaring me Young Poet of the Year, in fact.
Did you get a prize?
Megan: I got a small trophy that I later drank wine out of that night. And I got a book token that I used to buy some books.
Maebh: I was trying to get her to wear the trophy on a chain around her neck at one of the gigs.
Megan: Yeah, like 'Young Poet of the Year...eat shit!'
Maebh: The rap kids love that.
Had any bad gigs at all?
Maebh: We had a gig in the Dublin Fringe Festival that Megan couldn't make because she had school the next day. So I tried to play on my own. The records were all going really slow or really fast and I was like AAAARRRGH! But it was okay because the crowd was really hyper, so I taught them dance routines instead.
Worst track of 2007?
Megan: My least favourite line in any song is in that Hey There Delilah song where he says ''Even deeper in love you'll fall' because it really annoys me when people make no grammatical sense just to make a rhyme happen.
My favourite line in that song is 'In two years you'll be done with school and I'll be making history.' Yeah, for shortest pop career ever.
Maebh: The song the guy from Black Eyed Peas has out at the moment is pretty disgusting. In fact any song he does with a female singer just ends up being (sings) 'Look at my ass / You wanna touch my ass / I've got an ass...'
Megan: Terrible.
Any Leaving Cert tips, finally?
Megan: My official Leaving Cert tip is don't read any of the handouts that your teachers give you because they warp your mind and make you unable to think for yourself. That's bad, so don't read any of them and definitely don't pay for them.
The message then would be 'fuck handouts'.
Megan: Yeah, precisely.
Interview: Eoin Butler
Photo: Marie Louise McCabe
Massive Attack
 You're Only Massive .... Gigs by Waterford band You're OnlyMassive tend to be a little unusual. So unusual, in fact, that itscreators don't even call them gigs, or refer to themselves as a bandfor that matter. "The first time we saw ourselves being called a band,we were laughing for, like, half an hour, because we're not a band, wedon't really play instruments," says Maebh Cheasty, one half of thefemale duo. Megan Nolan, the other half of the band, is back home in Waterford doing her Leaving Cert. Seventeen-year-old Nolan and 23-year-old Cheasty first came to most people's attention when You're Only Massive played the Hard Working Class Heroes festival last year. Part band, part performance art, part DJ and part MC, this precocious, shambolic and always goodtime duo did away with the usual requirements of musical skill and posturing and instead offered a window into their bedroom-style party, as they sang along with their favourite records, skewed so-called post-feminist lyrics, all while hula-hooping and dancing their way through their sets. The speed of band's progress from germinal idea to live performance is illustrative of their approach in general. "The first time we had a gig we literally practiced for that day. It was all very slapdash at the start." This is one of the areas where You're Only Massive diverge from their contemporaries. For them, it's not about achieving perfection. "Trying is good, I think," says Cheasty. "What I like is just to see a performer at risk; really invested at that moment and trying hard. Some people want to see something different. You can't please everyone." Indeed, they have their detractors and the word 'amateur' has been thrown around. "I'm proud and happy to be an amateur," says Cheasty. "The second something is perfect, that's when it's dead, that's the moment it loses interest for you. Ideally, you'd never perfect it. The second you have something finished, then you're just Beyonce. I just really enjoy the feeling of going beyond that and saying, 'Look, this is what we are. We're not pretending to be virtuoso -- if you want something polished and to see someone do an amazing skill, that's not what we are'." And that is where their unique appeal lies. It's liberating for both performers and audience to experience something a little less uptight than studied performances in cool. "There is a kind of liberation in that. I love it, it's so much fun." You're Only Massive's main ambition, says Cheasty, is a simple one; to get the party started. But their lyrics have a socio-political dimension and the band has strong echoes of New York's Le Tigre and Berlin's Chicks On Speed. "There's so many great songs out there already, why would you add to that unless you have something to say?" asks Cheasty. One popular live song called Booty deals with the current taste in music for the female posterior. "Fergie and Beyonce, their lyrics are just like, 'I've got an ass. You wanna look at my ass'. There's something really kind of weird and fetishised about it, and it's all about money. And Kelly Rowland's song, Like This, it's like, 'what are you saying?' I'm so emancipated because I've got a boob job? And really it's, like, 'no you're not, you fool'. Booty is a song that just came out of that." This outspokenness comes across in their performances too, although Cheasty's seniority and background in youth theatre make her the more forthright performer of the two. Their latest project is called Disco-nnect and is part of the Dublin Docklands festival We Are Here 3.0. It combines elements of their current stage performance with a guided walking tour around the Docklands, culminating with a gig and a party. "The idea of the audience as kind of an active member of the whole thing is my ideal. Obviously, it doesn't always happen at gigs, because you turn up at your normal indie gig and it's, like, 'okay everyone, do this,' and they're, like 'It's Friday night! Don't make us do that!' "With the walking tour, the idea is to prepare people for the gig, so when they arrive they know the dances, they're psyched up and ready to go. I think there is a tendency to go to something with your arms folded, to be engaged with something mentally but not physically. It is a stereotype about the Dublin indie crowd just standing there, but it is kind of true too." Setting their show in different spaces to the norm (where norms of behaviour are also observed) is important to them. "I think people do create their own cultural spaces at house parties. One thing I missed when I moved to Dublin was the sessions that take place in Waterford, because people just have fun and dance." Their plans for the short-term future include releasing a 12" with Dublin-based Cork band Queen Kong, and Cheasty has another show in development, too. "It is a lot more domestic and involves cooking," she says coyly. The 12" release will be all original, considering the kind of licensing headache that would come with releasing songs that feature the samples they use live. (The Go! Team, for example, had to re-release a remixed version of their debut album Thunder, Lightning, Strike because of sample clearance issues.) "We used two of Ed Chamberlain's beats, he's written some really nice emails giving us his support, but obviously releasing is a whole other thing." In the meantime, they're planning to take Disco-nnect to New York Conflux festival in September and to do a 32 county tour of Ireland, although some counties are not so sure about them yet. "At the moment it's an 18 county tour," says Cheasty. "Mullingar are not feeling You're Only Massive. I was quite disappointed; the town that gave us Joe Dolan doesn't have time for You're Only Massive." One thing is sure: this maverick duo certainly has a few surprises in store for those attending Disco-nnect, although they claim no one will be made do anything they don't want to... Disco-nnect June 30-July 5, Sir John Rogerson's Quay. €10/8. www.wearehere.ie www.myspace.com/youreonlymassive - Edel Coffey
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Currently
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The Master: A Novel
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Colm Toibin
Release date: 19 April, 2005
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Sunday, July 08, 2007
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Do you have any YoureOnlyMassive gig photos?
Current mood:  awake
Category: Parties and Nightlife
If so, oh do please post them here or send them to me at youreonlymassive at gmail dot com. Then i can put them up here and will be most grateful to you yes oh that would be swell.
*maebh
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The Practice of Everyday Life
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Michel de Certeau
Release date: 02 December, 2002
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blessed