Dirty-ass R&B twisted into their own nasty, digging thing. These fuckers are from - wait for it - Lurgan. Ever heard of it? No, me neither. It’s in County Armagh. Here’s a link. https://thebonnevilles.co.uk/home It has a population of 23 thousand and was one of three towns referred to during Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ (now there’s a fucking understatement) as ‘the murder triangle’. So saying you’re from Lurgan might just be code for ‘I’ve just escaped from Snowtown, sweet jesus, save me’.
The Bonnevilles’ website cites useful knee-jerk terms (‘the Bonnevilles take punk blues as use it as a spring board to create a completely new genre’) which I spose is kind of right.
But all that matters is that this is honest, sweaty, gripping music which grabs hold of you in it’s fuzzy, grotty paw and doesn’t let up till the CD player in the car decides to start all over again.
Of course, by this time your car is in a ditch and the police have arrived with that "fucking meth-hea"’ expression, which they are about to be disabused of when they hear The Bonnevilles.
Indeed, they’ll impound the CD as evidence and play it loud as they, bundle you into the back of the paddy-wagon (ahem, apologies Irish readers) and racket and career and jolt the thing down the road to the local pokey while songs like "Erotica Laguna Lurgana" (fuck, they’ve got a sense of humour, don’t they?) or ‘No Law in Lurgan’.
If you squint just for a second, The Bonnevilles are the music of a wild western, set in Ireland in 2017. Only the guns and bombs are a lot more unpleasant than those in a nice safe John Wayne flick. In Lurgan, the only good pilgrim is a dead pilgrim.
P.S. This is from the Bonnevilles' page, it's rather brilliant:
Lead singer and guitarist Andrew McGibbon Jr had this to say to the Huffington Post when they exclusively previewed & streamed Arrow Pierce My Heart...
We decided to write a love album, hence the title Arrow Pierce My Heart, but we aren't balladeers so it ended up littered with our usual topics - death, rising from the dead, murders, drinking, drugs, sex, revenge and more revenge, but that's ok.
Because we're Irish, which isn't so much a race of people as it is a death cult, we deal with this stuff so you don't have to and our idea of love is a dark love not the sickly sweet kind. Not so much roses and kittens but whiskey and shame, and that too is ok. We take our responsibility as the conduits of the Gods very seriously. The human experience is about sinning and failing; that's where the acid is and that's what we try to write about.
