Melodic hard rock to get your jaw working

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell

Hard-rocking yet still melodic, Fox Jaw play Monroe’s Live on Monday August 14. The Limerick-based quintet used to go under the name of Fox Jaw Bounty Hunters, but are now going by an abbreviated moniker.

“We had more of a haircut I think, we halved it!” says leadsinger and guitarist Ronan Mitchell. “Everyone that knows us call us Fox Jaw. And when you’re playing gigs late at night and the punters are there saying ‘are ye called?’ and you say Fox Jaw Bounty Hunters they say ‘Foxy What? Fox Trot something or other.’ People always got it wrong. Fox Trot Nineteen Hundreds was one that came back to us before.”

Fox Jaw’s music has an edginess to it – did the band talk about the direction they wanted the music to take before they started playing?

“We never really had any discussions about where we wanted the band to go, we always just tried to write songs we thought were good,” says Ronan. “It always gravitated towards the darker side, I think we do listen to stuff in that vein.”

But, like Queens Of The Stones Age, Fox Jaw’s hard rock has a groove and swing to it.

“Firstly, as a songwriter, that’s how I approach it,” Ronan says. “It has to have good hooks and a groove, and rock out but still be a bit weird. That’s our modus operandi I suppose. Everyone likes a good tune and a good melody, but if you’re striving to be an artist you’ll always want to do something a bit weird and on the darker side.”

Fox Jaw will be releasing their album A Ghost’s Parade in mid September. The album was produced by Dave Christopher who worked on Whipping Boy’s classic Heartworm album.

“We’d never really worked with a producer before,” Ronan says. “But Dave just got us completely and he had some great ideas, he could see what we were trying to do.

“A lot of the songs on this album are different from each other, and we were a bit worried that the album might be a bit disjointed,” he adds. “You’ve got a bluesy thumper, and then a fifties crooner song and then there’s one that sounds like a 1960S bosa nova track. He was really able to find the similarities between them and link them all together.”

Dave’s philosophy, it seems, is to be prepared before you go into the pressure cooker atmosphere of a studio.

For more,  read this week’s  Connacht Tribune.