Davy Kehoe - Short Passing Game

Pitchfork 77

Your first thought, launching into the opening song on Davy Kehoe’s debut mini-album, Short Passing Game, may be that you’re listening to it at 45 instead of 33. It’s ridiculously fast, almost too fast: The drum machine tumbles in a syncopated, breakneck blur, shuddering like a washing machine at the furious peak of its spin cycle. The rhythm approximates krautrock’s motorik pulse but sped up until it throws off sparks. On electric bass, a one-note refrain is thumbed with such relentless determination you can practically see the blood spattered on the pick guard. Do not adjust your turntable; there’s nothing wrong with the playback speed. This is the Irish producer Davy Kehoe’s strange and exhilarating vision of electronic music, poised somewhere between Suicide and Neu!, slathered in harmonica and dub delay, and shuddering like a train about to go off the rails.

Kehoe’s album comes to us via Dublin’s Wah Wah Wino, a fledgling imprint that is only slightly less mysterious than Kehoe himself. Until now, the label has been known mainly for wonky, off-kilter electronic music that’s up to its elbows in haywire buzz and squelch. Its four ambiguously credited records so far have mostly been collaboratively produced by label heads Omid Geadizadeh, Olmo Devin, and Morgan Buckley, with assists from various friends, including Kehoe. Short Passing Game, which features input from Geadizadeh and Buckley along with Seán Mac Erlaine and Cloud Castle Lake’s Brendan Jenkinson, reinforces Wino’s rep as a home for strange sounds that don’t fit anywhere else. But it also introduces a new factor into play, something approaching a kind of virtuosity.

Kehoe’s music stakes a position halfway between studio constructions and live jams. His drum machine serves as the spine throughout, with rhythms that range from lunkheaded to sidewinding to svelte. Around that thrumming pulse, Kehoe and his collaborators weave electric guitar and bass, organ, hi-hat, bodhrán, mbira, harmonica, Korg MS-20 synthesizer, and an antiquated string synthesizer called the Siel Orchestra into a porous mesh of battered tones and slippery textures. Kehoe and his collaborators’ long, corkscrewing grooves have something in common with Cavern of Anti-Matter’s krautrock studies, but there’s an even more unhinged quality at work here, with dubbed-out yelps and wheezy harmonica blasts adding to the manic energy. It’s often hard to say with any certainty what instrument is making which sound: Focus your attention beyond the rhythmic handrail, and you’re immersed in a foggy field of crickets, shouts, creaks, drones, and squiggling sine waves. On “Happy Highway,” junkyard guitar riffs recall Horse Lords’ West African-inspired guitar work, while dissonant sheets of guitar feedback suggest Sonic Youth’s atmospheric influence.

On songs both fast and slow, it’s uniformly hypnotic; unlike a lot of music that thrives upon stoned repetition, however, Kehoe’s doesn’t shy away from emotional expression, particularly once the tempo slows down. In contrast to the exhilarating blues of “Happy Highway” and the white-knuckled freakout of “Short Passing Game,” the 10-minute centerpiece “Storm Desmond” is slow, meditative, and gorgeous. A brooding bass clarinet is run through electronic processing that resembles Jon Hassell’s ambivalent atmospheres; the dub-inflected rhythm steps around the mbira like a cat walking through high grass.

“Going Machine” is similarly enveloping, its organ and bassline warily circle each other while hi-hats flicker like a 16mm film projector. As the groove builds, a voice appears out of nowhere, speaking in riddles: “I think at mouth speed, but have my thoughts cancelled before speech.” A burst of rhythmic laughter, imposing as a Greek chorus, tears across the stereo field. You may wonder, What the hell just happened? Your guess is as good as mine; neither the voice nor the laughter makes a return appearance. It’s a testament to the entrancing power of Kehoe’s music that he can break his own spell without losing his hold on the listener. You’re left waiting for the other shoe to drop—Where’d the voice go? Who’s hiding behind the curtain?—while the drums dance nimbly across offbeats and upbeats, moving like a dream of flying, never so much as touching the ground.