Paraphrase the famous ‘I may not like what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it’ into ‘I think your sexual politics are more than a little dodgy, you look unpleasant (and decidedly unwashed), but you’re the first Irish band in history to whose music you can imagine getting it on’, and you have Republic of Loose summed up.

While the lone troubadours of Dublin’s Grafton Street (now immortalised in that film Once) were busy thinking and wailing about the dark night of the soul, the pyro brothers and co. were probably down the pub downing pints and thinking about knickers. 

On the basis of this lush, smooth, and yes – that much abused term – funky track, their time was well spent. The song. To give them their due, there’s tight musicianship (but never white-boy-too-tight-style) and enough sense of identity here to suggest that, like all great bands, there’s something cohesive and strong beyond the individual songs. Take a snip of Mick Pyro’s description about the band’s origins:

“ It all originated from when I was in college, in bands, and going through all kinds of torture about authenticity and what it meant, and trying to find proper voice for the person I was. I started educating myself and reading a lot of shit and I realised that – I know this sounds highfalutin – but authenticity was a construct. And a bogus construct at that, invented by a bunch of wack-jobs outta their heads on opium and nature in the nineteenth century. Once I’d made that revelation, I felt completely liberated. I just stripped down my brain for all the things I liked in music, which all came down to James Brown and The Rolling Stones; they were the cornerstones I could build a foundation on.” 

And it’s a great mix. They should wash a bit more though.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg0t-y7Wd70