Off The Record: Limerick quintet are ones to watch
LISTENING to Limerick quintet, Cascando, is like opening a time capsule and being propelled into the sixties.
Fuelled by a love for country and blues, the roots rock band blends influences of the late sixties with modern folk and soul sounds, making for quite the eclectic cocktail.
“A lot of our influences come from the fifties, sixties, kind of blues rockabilly stuff. It’s more about the sincerity and the live recording aspect of it, there's no hiding behind the music, which we really like. Back then, it was a budget thing. You’d have three takes to get it right. And if you didn't get it right, that's game over and those mistakes kind of stay in the song,” says member Luke Foley.
Bassist Luke Foley, lead guitarist Seth Rackard, rhythm guitarist Oscar Halpin, drummer Liam Liddane and 12-string guitarist Ewan O’Dea collided to create music that “makes you want to square dance and carve wood.”
Mission accomplished as Cascando released their second single, A Few Blue Words For The Wise last week - a song you can't help but dance to.
Produced by Chris Quigley of the PVP, the release is a follow-up from their very well received and highly-anticipated debut single, Canyon Music..
With a jangly soundscape, fresh lyrics and sonic avenues, A Few Blue Words For The Wise melds coherently with their previous offering.
Before the release, the band went on a mini Irish tour and sold out three headline gigs in Limerick, Galway and Dublin.
While recording their upcoming EP, the band named after a play by Samuel Beckett, aimed for an upfront approach - to record all the tracks live and establish themselves as a live band, with no “hiding behind the production.”
“I guess it's just where like we started off as a live band playing shows, and that's where we kind of get a lot of our fun from is playing live shows.
“For the first year of playing, we didn't even release any music, we were just playing whatever shows were given to us and just improvising songs,” recalls the bassist.
At the start, they didn't have any songs out.
“We kind of showed up with our guitars and played. That’s how we grew as a band. It was a bit mysterious. You don't know the music, there's no place to listen to it. You have to go to the shows to listen to it.”
After supporting other artists in Pharmacia, Cascando played their own live shows. Speaking of the local music scene, Luke points out: “The great thing about local places, you can curate your own shows, and you can take ownership of your own shows.”
They are influenced by the likes of The Beach Boys, Hank Williams and Jimi Hendrix. But, what brought the quintet together is their love for the sixties - including for The Doors.
“We all kind of grew up with a love of sixties rock, like The Doors. When we were jamming during Covid, you could've just called us The Doors' tribute band,” he laughs.
The five Limerick musicians could also all be called jack-of-all-trades.
“We swap instruments very often. If Oscar's writing a song, he'll play guitar and then if I'm writing a song, I'll play guitar. We’d swap around like that,” Luke explains.
“We all write songs ourselves. All of those songs came from one of us bringing a guitar riff, jamming it out, and then coming up with parts. Seeing what fits, keep playing them live, testing it out, that was a big part of the first few gigs.”
Even though the two songs they released so far are pretty upbeat, the quintet can also play folkier ballads.
“You can't really lay them live when we're presenting this kind of fast, energetic rock kind of thing. We did an acoustic gig recently in Dolan’s, where we only played some of the softer songs. That went down pretty well which was fun because we had to switch it up a bit, instead of jumping around like a lunatic on stage,” he smiles.
As the band members live in different parts of the country and one lives abroad, they mainly get to rehearse before they play - which makes them want to “get things done.”
“When we have a gig, it's probably the first time we've seen each other in a few weeks. So we'll spend the day practicing and that'll be our kind of pre-gig ritual,” explains Luke.
How has that worked out so far?
“The first year of playing was ridiculous,” he notes. “We would only play together at gigs. Not even before, the gigs would be our practice session. We'd just be like improvising on stage and that would be us practicing.”
A process the bassist believes helped them gain more confidence,
“It was really good, we were able to do new things on stage, which is you rarely see. It's usually very much like this is the song we're playing,” he says.
"What we try to do is play the song differently every time. And the fact that we're all spread apart is bad because we don't see a lot of each other, but when we do, we're very much in a mindset of, let's get this done.”
Now, Cascando are looking forward to the release of their EP, which should be out mid-October.
“We don't have a specific date because we're trying to organise it so that we'll have a release party in Pharmacia. It’s gonna be a cowboy theme.”
In the meantime, if there is one thing they would like people to know about them, it's how much they love playing.
“That’s the only reason we do it is, because it's just such good fun playing live shows. It's like we're only really doing the album to have it there, but it's also just a way to get to the next level of playing live shows and playing to more and more people. It's really about the music for us.”
You can listen to A Few Blue Words For The Wise on all platforms.