Plinth is a hard band to describe. By design. Any band who calls their EP Tenzuke Chiste, with tracks called Inthrinjington Dessyne and Vascanagina you know that they are not taking the easy route. The one question they won’t answer is how they pick the name of their tracks (personally I think they take the left over bits of the 1,000 monkeys on 1,000 typewriters). I’m still not sure how to pronounce any of them.
I think a good way to describe their music is, take tracks from Pantera, The Camembert Quartet, Nick Cave and Nik Kershaw. Chop these tracks and chop them up in to 20 second samples, then play on shuffle. Experimental music is a very good way to describe it. Emmet, their lead vocals, cites John Cage as a major influence. He also like that description. As he is studying for a masters in music composition in UCC (after a law degree, jokes about copyright and contract law have already been made) he doesn’t exactly deny that the band’s music and his studies are entirely separate. Schizophrenic genre-hopping tracks are all very well in a studio with editing, but to play these live requires that Brian, Dan, Emmet and Joe need to spend a lot of time practising in order to make the music possible. I don’t know if they have reached the Outliers requirement of 10,000 hours, but they manage to do it as this video shows The video includes their support band on launch night, Cities and Plinth start around the 6 minute mark.
Plinth EP Launch in the Old Oak, Cork from Damien Murphy on Vimeo.
You have to admit, its a long way from covers of Metallica, Alice in Chains and Tool. The band have a lot of dedicated fans, and have tightened since they were named as one of five finalists in the Eircom Unsigned Bands Competition in 2008 with their track “Eakombookom”.
