Archive
Bennys Head
The Roundy
7 May 2009
9pm
FREE
7 May 2009
9pm
FREE
Fresh on the heels of the release of their 3rd album ‘WORDS & SUCH' the band play the Roundy on May 7th. Bennys Head revolves around the songwriting partnership of Cormac O'Connor and Frank West.
The current line up features:
George Hanover (Snatch Comedy)
Gary Cotter (Naildrivers/Underworld/4B2'S)
Ian Walsh (Naildrivers/Silvia Saint)
Cormac O'Connor: works as a sound designer for theatre and film with many credits including the award winning 'Disco Pigs'. Cormac has been in Bennys Head since it's inception in 1985 and, apart from a stint running a recording studio from a boat in Cambridge from 2001-2004, he has lived in Cork dilligently obsessing about music technology. In recent times, video design has become part of his work and features prominently in work done with Bennys Head. Frank West: is an unenthusiastic and uncommitted spectator in days given over entirely to spectacle. Has little or no interest in watching the trucks of landfill that make their way past his window. Fear of becoming part of that landfill has provided sufficient motivation for him to play and to write music. Concerned with developing different strategies for leaving things as they are, for leaving things well alone, for not placing them until they find or don’t find their own sound, their own rhythm. Lifelong work this. Membership of Bennys Head part of this ongoing pursuit. Unexpectedly, the sound of high tension cables, slung low, fizzing over fields, late October evenings.
REVIEW OF ' WORDS AND SUCH' BENNYS HEAD
IRISH EXAMINER 17/01/09
4 STARS ****
Bennys Head is a partnership between Cormac O'Connor, a sound designer for theatre and film whose credits include Corcadorca's Disco Pigs, and musician and lyricist Frank west.
Words and Such was recorded and produced by Bennys Head themselves, yet it says much for the seriousness of their endeavour that they have had it mastered by the award winning Bob Katz in Orlando, Florida.
Words and Such is evidence of a decidedly left field approach to music making. Bennys Head may well be a lush pop ensemble, but close attention to the lyrics reveals there is an admirable weirdness at work here. The very first track Those Pre Emo Boys describes a sorry bunch absorbed in 'their clownish ridiculous lust'.
Things get stranger thereafter, never more so than on the track Harry Dean Stanton, which name- checks both the grizzled character actor and the jazz musician Birgit Uhler. Somehow Jessis Kennedy's guest vocal on the outro adds a pleasent sheen to what is otherwise as surreal a pop song as one might wish for.
If there is a philosophy at work , on Words and Such it is probably best summed up in The Art Of Never Arriving, on which the narrator muses on " the way you dream, the way you drive/The way you take the roads that never arrive".
Benny's journey to date has, one suspects, been just as dreamy and circuitous, but it would surely spoil the ride if they were actually to fetch up at anything as banal as a destination.

