Music Review: Richie Kavanagh’s ‘Are The Bin Men Coming’

PROBABLY one of the most quintessential pieces of music in modern day Irish history, Richie Kavangh’s  ‘Are The Bin Men Coming‘ effortlessly portrays the age old process of waiting for your refuse bin provider to arrive.

It is reliably unorthodox, a new sonic adventure for the restless Carlow superstar, but despite his nostalgic rhythms and break neck beats, it is elegantly pleasing, and one cannot help but succumb to its seductive tones, letting it triumphantly masturbate the ear.

Taking the tender intimacy of Richie’s previous classics such as ‘Stay with her Johnny‘ and ‘Aoin Focail Eile’ while interbreeding them them with elements too complicated to retrieve from a thesaurus, the result is a kind of a cavalcade of mashed up music sperm that could have well been hammered out by the Angel Gabriel himself.

Instinctively contrary, but also linguistically challenging, Kavanagh somehow finds a space between the surreal and the sublime, the tense and the senseless. He remains a master of musical dichotomy and modestly refrains from the fashion norm of the day by garnishing his crusty paws with a pair of neatly knitted, fingerless gloves.

Richie has always been an innovator of tongues, preferring a kind of inaudible lyric, where key lines shift into sexual preferences and then disappear into a childish undertone of clerical abuse. One cannot help but wonder if the star has underlying schizophrenic tendencies as he shifts from one Richie voice to the other, leaving listeners wondering: which one is the real Richie Kavanagh, and why so many key changes.

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As the title somehow suggests, Are The Bin Men Coming has somewhat straightforward imagery: the worn old bin being wheeled out to the front gate, much like its owner, sometimes lacking in real substance, but full of shit none-the-less.

Between his grainy middle-eastern twang and spontaneous rhythm, the track is filled with saucy synthesizer loops and bone chilling sound-bites. It’s almost impossible to think of these in terms of musical arrangements, they are too sporadic and too deep to understand; much like a nail-file being shoved back and forth between your teeth.

The song itself ends neither with a bang nor a gastric release, rather it gently whisks off into the sunset like some kind of crazed kamikaze moth high on blotter acid. The abiding impression is of a man in his musical prime, who sees nothing wrong with eating a breakfast roll while fingering a sheep. And who can fault him for that.

If this is what the future of Irish music sounds like, then find me a Delorean with a working flux capacitor, because Marty we’ve got to go back, back to the future.