JINX LENNON

SONGS ABOUT XANAX,WORK,MENTAL HEALTH,,PORN,DIABETES,STRESS, ,LOAN SHARKS,DOLE SNITCHES,COUGH MEDICINE,BOYRACERS,HAIR LOSS,AND THE MEN WHO CAN BE MOULDED

For me the best songwriter in the country at the moment is Jinx Lennon, and he matters. He matters to me. And we don‘t hear him because he's telling the truth. He's singing about this island we live in as it is, and he doesn’t get airplay. Why doesn’t he get airplay? …Because he's telling the truth. And why can’t people deal with that truth?... Because it's very raw, and he doesn’t sugar it up.

Christy Moore

Chances are you've never heard of Jinx Lennon. Even in Ireland he's far from famous, and except for a 2015 house party I got to attend, his only NYC-area gigs came in 2005 via Lach, whose amorphously contrarian "antifolk" catchall suits Lennon as it does few others. Structurally, he's a singer-songwriter, earning his musical pittance performing his own songs over acoustic guitar. But that not only undersells his hyperactive show and ignores his live beat gear and studio horns, it misrepresents the aggressiveness of half-rapped, power-strummed rants far less predictable and more propulsive than, for instance, the rote metrics of original "punk poet" John Cooper Clarke. It misses how irrepressibly Lennon shouts and how insistently he repeats linchpin phrases. And it evokes a limpid lyricism he almost never trucks with, although he knows full well that his sing-along choruses are what render him inspirational in the end. My favorite goes: "No need to feel that you are a toerag/You're not a scumbag, yeah, you're not a scumbag." But there are many others, and he means them all.

BOB CHRISTGAU -THE DEAN OF AMERICAN ROCK CRITICS (ROLLING STONE/VILLAGE VOICE/CREEM)

SOPHIE COYLE

After the launch of her critically acclaimed album “Blame Me for the Storm”, Sophie Coyle returns to with a fresh new set of songs which chronicle a journey through South America. Coyle was recently shortlisted for the International Songwriters Competition and long-listed for album of the year by the Choice Music Awards. Coyle delivers stories carved in her own lore, conjured by her own unique lyrical dynamism. She fuses the laid-back west coast vibe of her native Galway with the sharply observational lyrical style of the north east.