Pádraig Cooney has been writing and performing in Dublin-based bands for over a decade, from Land Lovers through Skelocrats to Autre Monde. He was a founder member of the Popical Island Collective, which ran a label, venue and other initiatives through the 2010s. He is now releasing material under his own name.
Centuries of Learning is the debut album by Dublin musician Pádraig Cooney. It is a distillation of his creative endeavours over several years writing, playing and singing in Dublin’s alt-pop underground, and an attempt to approach a record, 13 years after the fact, in the way he approached 2008’s Land Lovers debut Romance Romance. That is, restricted to synths, guitar and drum machine, with a mixture of premeditation and improvisation, make the most complete one-person pop suite that his abilities would allow at that time.
The title 'Centuries of Learning' is taken from the song Space, where in context it refers to the accumulation of education, technical expertise and cultural knowledge put by Europeans to the service of violent exploitation of the rest of the planet. As the album title, it says: "I've been at this long enough, here's what I have gathered".
Over the course of its 13 songs admittedly anchored in the aesthetics of the 1970s, you’ll find dark electronic passages (Off the Books), hints of Italian TV variety show instrumentals (Another Reputation Ruined), slinky French pop (Engrenages), the expansive Space, the hooky Green Light, the dark country rumination of Moonlight and the primary-coloured Talleyrand. Bronwyn Murphy White, Padraig’s wife and bandmate in Skelocrats, pops up for a star turn lead vocal on Houses.
Lyrically, it’s a wild ride from meaningless musicality (Green Light) to imperialism (Off the Books), colonialism (Space), housing (Houses), environmental vandalism (Nature Walks), historical figures as ferrets (Talleyrand), mind-controlled killers (A Drifter Sings) and, beyond linguistic content, an instrumental that attempts to soundtrack a video of people messing on a diving platform during a big storm (Blackrock Diving Tower).
Engrenages was an annoying tune that would play in Pádraig Cooney’s head for 5 years every time he watched the French cop series of the same name (Spiral in English). What better way to combat a problem like this than to turn it into an actual song and release it as a debut single ahead of songs that were high-mindedly and artfully created? There’s just no telling what will work, and the annoying tune may still be annoying (we leave that to listener discretion) but it delighted its maker. There may be hints of Boney M, there’s certainly something nebulous, perhaps it’s a party song from a cheap 70s film, and there’s definitely a North African undercurrent. Anyway, please enjoy its budget pleasures.
The video was made by Gary Sheridan and Eoghan O’Brien, and stars the latter.
Padraig says: “It is one of the best French-language songs released by an Irish artist this year”.
