“Precious Rusted Things is a joyful celebration of the things we carry with us through life, long after they’ve lost their initial shine. It is an anthem to the flaws which make a cherished thing more personal, more unique, more human. 

Built around a Saharan influenced syncopated guitar riff adrift in waves of granular synths and glitchy percussion, Precious Rusted Things owes a clear debt to eighties luminaries like Talking Heads and Fleetwood Mac, while also drawing on early 2000s influences like Animal Collective and Broken Social Scene. The song has a rattling swagger and frayed edges that shine with an optimistic fervour for the imperfections of deep and lasting love.”

FEAST

The majority of the songs that make up Feast were written all the way back in 2012. The Dying Seconds had just moved to London on the back of encouraging success and praise for their second album from some of the people they respected most in the music world. Eager to capitalise on the momentum this gave them, they set about writing the follow up.

With a frenzied energy the band would spend most of their evenings in a sweatbox of a cramped practice room in the south of the city, jamming endlessly and trying to find the direction they wanted to go in together. The plan was to record the new album throughout 2013 and have it ready for release the following year. As plans tend to, this one went awry.

Things came to a crashing halt when during the drum recording sessions for the album, lead songwriter David Cantan began suffering from debilitating pain that made it impossible to continue. It put a stop to the band’s plans for the foreseeable future as the singer returned to Ireland to recuperate and seek treatment.

Weeks turned into months, with no successful cure found, and a return to London became more and more unlikely. Despite no longer being able to play together, the songs that they wrote in that room in their first year of living in London remained on their minds and the intention to finish what they had started never left.

Now living in the south of Ireland, Cantan would spend time bringing together all the elements which were recorded in London with new parts from session musicians from all around the world; hiring and collaborating with over 30 performers on 5 different continents. Progress was slow as a result of the ongoing chronic illness, but the reduced pace meant every move could be more considered and thought out, no longer operating in the pressure cooker of the band’s shared house in London.

To complement the spiraling polymetric guitars of Mark Rooney, the harmonically rich cinematic soundscapes of Jack Quilligan’s keys, and McCartney-esque melodic basslines of Gary Donald, contributing musicians on the album include, among others, a string quartet from Ukraine, a drummer in LA, a gospel choir from Nigeria, brass players in Venezuela, and a female singer from Malaysia, all organised online and their parts produced and arranged from Cantan’s home studio in the Wexford countryside.

The Dying Seconds are now separated by the Irish sea, unable to play live, with their only ambitions involving the music itself, for its own sake. The result is Feast, a collection of songs that represent everything that the band had set out to achieve all those years ago, finally realised and brought kicking and screaming into being.

The phrase ‘labour of love’ is an overused cliche in promotional material for artistic projects. This album is a labour of perseverance and stubbornness, a pig-headed refusal to give up on an idea of perfection, no matter how imperfect the journey to get there becomes. Feast is about embracing those flaws as reality devours the dream and replaces it with the beauty and brutality of life.