Our favourite Belfast brothers Otherish – and their ever-willing pals – are back with more brain-baffling high-jinks. There’s nothing much happening in a futuristic Belfast or is there…?
Release Date: 7th June 2024
Label: Self Release
Formats: Digital
By their own productive standards, things seem to have been a little quiet from Otherish, lately. In fact, it’s been almost nine months since we last heard from the band – Belfast-born brothers Mark and Paul Bradley and their mates Francis Kane and George Claridge – a veritable age, when measured on the Otherish continuum.
Last time around, Otherish used their August 2023 album, How Lucky We Are Being Us and Each Other, to give us all a lesson in how to reset our musical points of reference in 13 easy stages. If you haven’t heard them before, then be prepared. Their music is unpredictable, original and highly, highly innovative and the band’s new single, Summer In Belfast, July 2098 continues to reinforce that evaluation.
Perhaps it was poet Andrew Keanie who proposed the most accurate summary of Otherish, when he said: “The music of Otherish is for beautiful, caustic, charming, confused, fragile, frank, free-ranging, hope-filled, ignorant, naïve panic-stricken, slippery, vain, wily human animals everywhere. Through that lizard-invigilated biosphere that is the habitable zone of Mainstream and Mainstreamish.” That’s one summary I’ve quoted before, and I offer no apology for using it again; it’s still the only description I’ve been able to find that goes anywhere near defining what Otherish are all about.
Rumours abound that Otherish are currently working on album#4 and we’ll certainly be keeping our ears to the ground to monitor progress on that particular front but, in the meantime, Summer In Belfast, July 2098 is a sufficiently meaty morsel to keep our Otherish pangs satisfied, at least for the time-being.
As its title infers, the song is a postcard in music, sent from the Belfast of the rapidly-approaching future. There’s not much going on over there, or so it seems. The song’s lyrics are dreamy and not a bit dystopian. Children play in the summer sun, their “Wee faces light up, as they run, run, run…” and the city’s residents go about their daily business, traveling – as you would expect – by public ‘Chute.’ And the story, such as it is, is told by voices that are – alternately and simultaneously – deep and high, distant and highly present. The music is spacey and gloriously funky, with a relentless pulsing rhythm, with a top-coating of lazy summer psychedelia thrown on for good measure.
The video, when you get to see it (and you surely must…) is choc-a-block with the “retro futurism” you’ll find in a Dan Dare comic strip, interspersed with psychedelic city scenes that are straight out of Magical Mystery Tour. Taken as a whole, Summer in Belfast is a joyous, unfathomable delight – and an enticing foretaste of whatever further treats Otherish might have up those sleeves of theirs.
Get a feel for Otherish – watch the official video to Their Mistake, a track from the band’s early 2023 album, Gone Wrong Rainbow Blues, here:
Otherish online: Bandcamp / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube
Keep up with At The Barrier: Facebook / X (formerly Twitter) / Instagram / Spotify / YouTube
Categories: Single Review
