Indie group to headline the Knocknarea Arena on Oct 29 as part of Sligo Live.
Dublin indie rock band, Little Green Cars will perform live on Saturday, October 29 in the Knocknarea Arena, IT Sligo as part of Sligo Live 2016.
Little Green Cars’ second album reinforces their status as one of the best bands in Ireland. Taking its title from the W.B. Yeats poem “Ephemera”, it is fitting that the band play the Festival as Sligo is the spiritual home of W.B. Yeats.
Released earlier this year, “Ephemera” garnered stunning reviews including 4 stars from The Irish Times who wrote “that the 12 songs sound like the most harmonious you’ll likely hear all year, however, is testament to the energy that has gone into them. Fear, loathing, remorse and anguish have rarely sounded so joyful”.
Little Green Cars were still in their teens when they were spotted and signed to Glassnote and recorded their widely-acclaimed 2013 debut “Absolute Zero” with producer Markus Dravs.
That album changed their lives, taking the five former school friends on tour everywhere from Europe and Australia to Russia and the States, which they criss-crossed six times in three years.
Now all in their early 20s, Little Green Cars are both a different band and the same five friends who met every Sunday aged 15 in singer Stevie Appleby’s garden shed to start writing songs. Those changes, their shared experiences and individual ups and downs are candidly documented in “Ephemera”, a gorgeous, grown-up album about, well, growing up.
Two deaths, relationship break-ups and their over two years’ worth of touring are among the key events that inform the album’s richly-textured, harmony-soaked rock songs. While the impact of those events will change over time, the intense emotions they evoked live on in the music.
All the time the band were on tour, they were writing new songs, some of which they honed live. All the time they were changing, as were family and friends back home, whose lives they could sometimes no longer relate to. Stevie and Faye O’Rourke – the band’s principal songwriters and interchanging lead vocalists – watched their love lives fall apart. All five questioned who they used to be and who they had become, not least guitarist Adam O’Regan, whose father passed away.
“It’s a transitional album,” says Stevie. “Lyrically, it’s all about change – the end of some eras, new beginnings, learning from the past and looking to the future. Ephemera means things that are important to you, but only for a short time. That could apply to music or relationships or even a particular day.”
All five members of the band – completed by Donagh Seaver O’Leary on bass and Dylan Lynch on drums – contribute to the music and harmonies. Having written on the road, the quintet returned to Dublin in 2014 to make demos. By the end of the year, they were ready to record their first batch of songs.
Keen to co-produce, they sought a trusted collaborator. Enter Rob Kirwan, at whose treasure trove Dublin studio the band experimented with sounds, adding electronics, mastering reverb, bringing in a cellist and learning to play the toy-like Omnichord.
A dozen exquisitely-crafted, exceptionally-sung, sumptuously-produced songs shimmer with the myriad of emotions the band has been through – restlessness, regret, love, heartbreak, hope and acceptance among them.
Tickets to see Little Green Cars in Sligo are €26.50 plus service charge (standing) and there is a very limited number of tiered seated tickets (€29.50 plus service charge). Tickets go on sale today, Thursday August 18 at 10.30am from www.sligolive.ie Ticketmaster.ie and from the Hawk’s Well Theatre box office on 071-9161518.
