PÁDRAIG COONEY

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. However, as the album title, it says: "I've been at this long enough, here's what I have learned".

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).