Wide Eyed And Ignorant
(Setanta/LP/CD)
Lorraine Feeney
Wide Eyed and Ignorant is a pop album; taking into account the fact that A House are advocates of the distictively off-kilter, shambolic, hopelessly romantic school of pop founded by The Go Betweens way back when. Dave Couse sounds, as ever, pissed on, pissed off and permanently perplexed, but this is still the most upbeat record A House have ever made.

Which comes as a relief, because if any band has justification for feeling bitter or peevish, it's A House. It seems as if every time they come close to getting a bite of the cherry, someone replaces it with a piece of wax fruit. It's not fair, and they know it's not fair, but at least i means they've never had the opportunity to fall into complacency. I'm sure that must come as great consolation to them. I Am The Greatest provide them with their first real chart breakthrough, and there's no reason why Wide Eyed shouldn't at least equal that success. One of its definite selling points is 'Here Come The Good Times', (wouldn't you have been disappointed if they hadn't followed that sentiment with "for a change"?) a slice of thumping glam-rock so defiantly festive that it comes as no surprise when Dave knowingly warbles "Merry Christmas baby" towards the end.

But even better is the track that follows it, 'She Keeps Me Humble' with a lyric ("I am bought and sold, body and soul/with no guarantees of her loving me") that brings about the same embarrassing stab of recognition you get from 'When I First Saw You'.

Even better again is 'Why Me'. For the first few listens, I wasn't sure about this, considering it to be too immediately indentifiable as an A House song to succeed, but I'm beginning to believe that it's precisely this quality of recognisability - if you'll forgive the expression - that elevates A House above every other current Irish act with the possible exception of the Divine Comedy, who soar above the masses like, well, like some sort of bird, I suppose. It's not just attributable to the now customary half-spoken lyric, or the equally familiar double dose of frustration and bemusement streaming through its veins. It's difficult to know what it is attributable to, except that it's the same quality that makes it possible to discern an REM track at five hundred paces, even when it's an instrumental.

Which isn't to say that you've heard all this before. A House have never been so gorgeously askew as on 'These Things', where Dave croons along to a backdrop of mutated strings and something that sounds curiously like a musical saw. 'The Comedy Is Over' is the most majestic singalong they've ever written, and for three glorious minutes during 'Big Talk', Fergal Bunbury is Johnny Marr, pure and simple. The only occasion when it seems as if they might be treading water is on 'Deadhead', but I can't dismiss a song that contains the lines "All you ever do is go out and get drunk and show off/You make fun, then crawl home, you crash out, then wake up/Prepare yourself to do it all again"? Nor do I wish to ever dismiss the possibility of A House one day achieving platinum success and living the showbiz dream. Everybody else is doing it, why can't they?