Wyvern Lingo – a band destined for harmony

Wyvern Lingo are a band to watch out for in 2015 and the Bray based trio will make their Galway debut with a show in Róisín Dubh on Saturday, February 7. The band (whose diverse influences include Jeff Buckley, Destiny’s Child and Frank Zappa) are: Karen Cowley (vocals/piano), Saoirse Duane (guitar) and Caoimhe Barry (vocals/percussion).

Their ear-catching harmonies are one of the things that will draw listeners to Wyvern Lingo. They’ve been working on them for a while, as Caoimhe explains.

“We all got to be good friends in secondary school, and that’s when we all got into music and started playing together,” she says. “From my perspective, we’ve always played music together and then formed the band properly in the last few years. We started gigging properly when we were 19, and in the last two years we’ve started recording. We’ve been a band as long as we’ve been friends but we’ve been a band with direction for the last year.”

Wyvern Lingo already have an impressive array of songs, with a range of themes and tones. This is probably due to the fact that all three of them write for the band.

“We’d write the bones of a song separately and then bring it to the table and work on it, pick it apart and put it back together again,” Caoimhe says. I don’t play the guitar, but I write on the guitar and the song changes drastically when I play it to Saoirse who can actually play the guitar. What I might present as a folky love ballad turns into something a lot more powerful. A song we’ll be releasing shortly, Fountains, is a good example of that.”