Cork’s Pale Rivers for free Galway concert

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@gmail.com

Pale Rivers are a Cork based alt-pop quintet who come to Róisín Dubh on Thursday next, April 19 for a free show with another Cork based outfit The Shaker Hymn. With atmospheric and melodic music, Pale Rivers may well appeal to fans of The National. Yet their name will be new to many punters.

Lead-singer and keys player Eoin Hally explains how the band came about

“Most of us are from Clonmel in Tipperary, so we know each other going back quite a while,” he says. “Our first gig was at Hard Working Class Heroes [in Dublin] in 2016. but we had been recording stuff for a while before that. We just weren’t playing any gigs.”

Eoin is joined in the band by Alex Ridley, Gerard Hodgers, David O’Connor and Dylan Fogarty, as Pale Rivers release their latest single, the sublime Montparnasse.  The song was recorded in Westland Studios in Dublin, and was produced by Owen Lewis and Steven Mullan, who are now based in Nashville – Lewis previously worked in a studio in Limerick, which is where Eoin first met him.

Later on, when the Pale Rivers singer was in the US, they bumped into each other by chance and decided the time was right to work together.

It’s been a fruitful collaboration, and Montparnasse is just one of the resulting tracks. What do Lewis and Mullan bring to the table as producers?

“Quite a bit, I think,” Eoin says. “There’s quite a cool dynamic there; they’re not just engineers who go ‘press record’. They contribute ideas and Steven plays keys on some of our songs as well.”

The songs Pale Rivers were writing evolved as they worked with the producing duo, and Eoin was delighted with the outcome.

“I would send them demos and we’d decide on what things to use. But going from a demo to a finished thing? The demo of Montparnasse is unrecognisable to what we finally came out with.

“Mixing is difficult because they’re in Nashville and we’re here,” Eoin continues. “So that’s challenging. But it’s definitely one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had recording music, for sure.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.