Haunted Images Release Highly Anticipated Debut Album (Irish Shoegaze/Alt Rock)
Haunted Images is the singular vision of Louth based producer and songwriter David O’Farrell-McGeary. Under this guise David creates beautiful, ethereal alt-rock shoegaze. Juxtaposing modern alt-metal influences Deftones and Deafheaven, against the left field ambience of Aphex Twin and shoegaze mainstays My Bloody Valentine, gives David his signature sound. One that, in equal parts, shimmers like a graceful celestial body, while at the same time with the dense wall of sound production, cascades over you like wave. Following the successful release of singles ‘if you want’, ‘grey days’, ‘sometimes’ and the stunning ‘stay awake’, which caught the attention of Hot Press, Golden Plec, Genuine Irish, Pure M Zine, Independent.ie, Ragged Cast and Rock N Load, David now returns with his self titled album, Haunted Images. This marks his largest and most realised body of work to date. An album that lyrically comes from a place of deep introspection and thematically addresses forgiveness in many different forms, an album that seeks to bring light to the impending darkness.
David says: “Overall, this album is about forgiveness. Forgiveness within yourself and forgiveness of the people around you. An exploration of dark periods of time through the lens of music. Although each song has its own individual identity, the piece as a whole definitely has its own unique identity. It’s a deeply introspective album where I dissect myself at every song and put many personal and traumatic experiences under a musical microscope”
The album opens with ‘I Forgive You’ a song written in London while on the road with Modernlove. The song acts as an introduction to the themes and ideas that reoccur throughout the album. Lyrically it was born out of a stream of consciousness approach as David wrote the song, the themes floating out of his subconscious. The slow build of various guitar and synth layers as David intones ‘for what it’s worth I forgive’ finally breaks in a euphoric crescendo.
‘If You Want’ follows, based around a simple two chord structure that after a quiet strummed intro gets treated with some heavy fuzz. The shift in dynamics in the track have a decidedly Smashing Pumpkins ‘Today’ feel. When speaking on the writing and recording of the track David says “It was a very fluid writing process as if the song had been written before and I’m just rerecording it from memory.” A blistering alt-rock track with a melody that becomes seared into your psyche.
Melding his love of classical music with the sonic motifs of Haunted Images gives the album it’s first instrumental. ‘Arklowemo’ pays homage to David’s love of classical music and the piano lessons he took as a kid. This wider sonic palette helps give the album depth and variety, amongst the fuzz and crashing drums this oasis of classical guitar and symphonic synths offers the listener a moment to breath and reflect. The title is both a nod to previous press dubbing his sound ‘arklow emo’ and to his hometown.
Aptly, David writes a lot of his music in the small hours of the night, finding these quieter moments of isolation allow him to access memory and emotion in a way that isn’t possible with the distractions of the day. ‘Stay Awake’ was written during one of these sessions. Living in a room in an apartment this isolation gave way to a lot of material, and songs that David says were ‘difficult but very honest songs’. Lyrically the song addresses the difficult subject of wanting to escape life by wanting to sleep forever, never to wake up. David pulls on his experiences of seeing loved ones feel like this, the weight of responsibility of another person’s life when you barely have control of your own life. When you have no idea how to save them, so you just make sure that they stay awake.
‘Sometimes’ was one of the songs borne from the period of isolation for David. David says of the track, ‘Everytime I play it, I get taken back to that dark room. It was a long room with a window at the end of it facing south. Which meant the sun would barely shine through it so the room was always covered in a dim, dull darkness’. The song perfectly capture the environment it was written in, as the song seemingly draws to a close, it lets loose with an avalanche of drums, fuzz guitars and a starry melody that seems to reflect the slender rays of sun that would penetrate the room. Equally haunting and beautiful.
The second instrumental ‘I Don’t Know Where It Begins or Where It Ends Anymore’ is the eerie calm in the eye of the storm before the album moves onto track 7, ‘ Take Me Instead’. Further expanding the sonic palette of the album, ‘Take Me Instead’ brings in elements of industrial and electronic music, placing them side by side with the albums more shoegaze and ambient influences. David experimented with different found sounds by recording cellular data interference from his phone by placing it beside his guitar pickup and saturating it with distortion and then filtering it through various plugins.
‘Grey Days’ returns to more familiar territory, one of the singles taken from the album it’s a showcase for David’s ability to write powerful alt-rock/shoegaze songs but always maintaining a keen sense of melody and hook. More restrained than the likes of ‘Sometimes’ or ‘Stay Awake’, it gives more space for the sugar coated, floaty melody that masks the darker lyrical content of how the worst days in your life become the ones that stay with you forever.
Third and final instrumental ‘A Grey Sky Over A City Of Ghosts’ is an extension of previous track ‘Grey Days’. One of the last songs written for the album, needing a break from mixing ‘Grey Days’ David began experimenting with the more ambient songs from the track, pulling out synth sounds and ran them through various distortions to create this epilogue to ‘Grey Days’ and pre-cursor to album closer, ‘Heavenlevel7 (I Think It’s OK Now)’. The oldest song on the album, it was always earmarked to close out the record. This song acts as the closing chapter of the album, with the lyrics reflecting this. David says, ‘They’re reflective and inquisitive, exploring ideas of free will, identity and being unaware of your role within the world. Like the majority of my songs, it explores disassociation and how it effects my day to day.’
The album draws from a rich sonic tapestry, David’s skill as songwriter and producer are evident from beginning to end, being soley responsible form the performance, recording and mixing of the album. When it came time to add drums to the track he turned to Cian McCluskey and made the trip to Abbey Lane Studios Drogheda to capture the huge drum sound that drives the album. The production across the album is slick and massive, which helps bring a more contemporary feel to a genre that can rely on well worn troupes. For every decibel of fuzz on the track its matched with a razor-sharp melody or soaring guitar lead. The result is a sonic landscape that feels both dense and delicate. Haunted Images is an invitation to get lost in the music and in being lost find catharsis. An essential voice within Ireland’s music scene.