The Resistance
I spoke to Rob McDonnell from the Dublin based folk rock band, The Resistance, about their music.
Going by this band’s name, the Resistance, I started to brace myself for what I thought would be a tough interview. Armed with the only bit of Paxman perseverance I could muster, I decided to bite the bullet right from the start and ask, where did the name come from?
The band’s guitarist, Rob McDonnell, cheerily greets me from the other end of the phone, already aware of my rash judgment. He quickly counteracts my concerns and says, “It’s one of the biggest misconceptions about us… because we have that name, people think that we’re in some way politically motivated, which we’re not at all.” In fact it’s quite the opposite. Rob continues to explain that the band’s name actually spawned from an in-joke. “We’ve all come to the stage now where we’re getting married. One or two of the lads are starting to have kids so it’s kind of like, we’re resisting giving up to tell you the truth… resisting the temptation to all retire and settle down and have kids”. Definitely not the type of resistance I originally thought!
With that settled we could move onto the more important things: music and money. The group itself is made up of five talented musicians. David Patterson plays guitar and lead vocals. Rob contributes complimentary mellow vocal harmonies while also playing guitar. Éanán Patterson plays the keys and the violin, Diarmuid Breathnach is on bass while Rob Allen plays drums. These five guys gel well together and have clearly mastered their instruments. They describe their sound as folk rock. The Resistance’s acoustic sets manage to strip off the layers of a digital age and bring the listener back to the skeletal, vulnerable, organic sounds of these age-old instruments.
“we try to give the acoustic guitar tone a bit of personality.”
Rob has been playing guitar for 18 years now and is still passionate about it, “I love it. I’ve more guitars than I have room for”. You can tell Rob’s guitars don’t stay idle for very long. His technique has clearly been honed and practiced for years. The strumming, hammer-ons and melodic guitar riffs in the band’s songs “To Have and to Hold” and “In Time”, for example, are constructed and delivered with polished perfection. Rob strives to get the best out of his instrument. He says “I don’t play fast but I do spend a lot of time playing the guitar and what I’m interested in is tone live and tone being recorded and I always find that you have to work so much harder to get an interesting tone out of an acoustic instrument than out of an electric instrument.” He adds “we try to give the acoustic guitar tone a bit of personality.”
It’s not just the Resistance’s guitar tone that’s injected with a life of its own, however. The band’s catchy chorus’ and insightful lyrics have absolutely no qualms about taking up camp in your head for a large chunk of the foreseeable future. I’m still working on getting the song “Rolling Back” kicked out of my consciousness. The chorus keeps coming up trumps with the irony card by rolling back in my head and playing again and again.
“we’ve actually had a lot of sales of the record from people we’ve never met in America just finding it on websites”.
The band’s financial endeavors are refreshingly positive The group have gone from strength to strength since claiming a spot in the top three soul festival’s rising stars last year. The Resistance released their debut album Bag of Bones on 15th March 2009. Since its release they’ve made good sales through websites like “CDBaby, Amazon and Napster”. The album has been very well received abroad with Rob claiming that “we’ve actually had a lot of sales of the record from people we’ve never met in America just finding it on websites”. The band generates the largest amount of royalties from the sale of their individual songs on i-tunes. Rob says “that was our objective, because we didn’t really want to go down the route of mass producing it because, as we found, having done it a number of times before, you end up… with them in boxes in your house so we put a small amount of them out and then started to push people to buy them from i-tunes.”
“recording in a place where there’s a river running under the floor… unbelievable!”
The band is intent on striving for absolute perfection. They were not totally happy with their previous album. As Rob says “We thought we could do so much better and we thought why don’t we actually go and do so much better.” The group were particularly unhappy with the recording studio… and can you blame them! Rob comments “you know recording in a place where there’s a river running under the floor… unbelievable!”
Rob adds “we found after a year and a half of playing the tunes with a new band that we play them much better than they are on the record so we met a producer who works in Peter Gabriel’s real world studios late last year so we’ve actually been over there rerecording [some of the songs from our previous album]. So we’re about half way through at the moment, because we’re doing it sporadically over a period of time.” Their latest album will feature two brand new songs with ten tracks in total. It will see a move away from a more acoustic sound. “The new record is way more electric which I’m actually quite happy about because I feel It’s easy to make something more stylized… they still have the same catchiness and punch to them but just the whole thing’s a lot more stylized so we’re really excited about the new record. It sounds really interesting and I think it’s going to be very well received.” The album is due to be released in September.
“We actually opened it [Soul Picnic] up last year, which was amazing, but unfortunately our lead singer couldn’t make it so I had to deputies for him, and I’m not the singer”
The Resistance are really looking forward to the Soul Festival even after experiencing a hairy start to last year’s performance. “We actually opened it [Soul Picnic] up last year, which was amazing, but unfortunately our lead singer couldn’t make it so I had to deputies for him, and I’m not the singer, but it went really well. The gig in meeting house square was the best gig we played all of last year so providing we get to that level, to that stage again we’d really look forward to doing that. I’m really excited about that.”
The bands next outing is on March 11th in Mother Rileys in Rathmines where they’re playing at a competition final.
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Thanks for the interview aine.
Very elequently written
Rob
Great job guys . . . resist!! don’t mind marriage and kids . . as one who knows these guys, they are probably the hardest working band I’ve ever met. I wish you blistering success!!!
Well done
OLD RED
Cheers
Thanks for the kind words mate. We must hook up for a beer down the zodiacs soon. Take it easy
Rob