Dean: The classic hiss of Ireland’s first ever Pavement covers album

Boreens & Backroads is a new compilation album with an unusual premise: Irish artists perform songs by beloved American indie bands Pavement and Silver Jews. I feel confident in declaring this to be the first local release to use such a concept.

The project has been conceived and created by new Dublin label Classic Hiss. Why this very specific idea was decided upon is unclear. The goal, however, is easy to grasp: Money raised from Boreens & Backroads will fund Palestinian aid organisations, as well as provide legal support for pro-Palestinian activists. It’s available for a tenner on Bandcamp and a second volume has been promised for later this year.

“Music doesn’t change the world on its own, but solidarity matters,” Classic Hiss has said. “This compilation is our way of standing with the Palestinian people, and of using the DIY community we love to channel support where it’s needed most.”

So, Pavement and Silver Jews – magical stuff, storied lynchpins of 1990s American college radio stations, bands that inspired 1,000 music nerds to start a blog, and pioneers of laconic, witty, cliché-free guitar music. (The two bands were strongly affiliated, so bringing them together like this is not arbitrary. Boreens & Backroads also includes covers of a solo number by Pavement drummer Gary Young.) The appeal of covering these greats is easy to understand, and the artists who have answered the call for the most part treat the original material with reverence. Indeed, the Irishness of this release is almost impossible to detect, lost in the crooked rain of American slacker enunciation and general Generation X mimicry.

But who are these bands? I’ve been writing this local music column for a long time now and I … hadn’t heard of most of them. Consider the opening track, a gloriously cassette tape-raw version of Pavement’s “Kennel District” complete with crunchy guitar riffs, distorted vocals, and plenty of fuzz. It’s credited to Aching Fauns and Shannon Duvall, two artists I would love to hear more of but can’t locate online. While there are some established names dotted throughout, Boreens & Backroads serves as a wonderful showcase for new talent.

“Kennel District” sets the tone for the first half of the compilation by sticking closely to sounds associated with ’90s American indie. Emerging Dublin band Fly Parts – who cite period staples such as Mouldy Peaches and Elliott Smith among their influences – perform a version of Silver Jews’ “How to Rent a Room” that preserves the original’s darkly shaded Americana origins. Elsewhere, Junk Drawer and MayKay’s cover of “Cut Your Hair” retains the oh oh oh oh oh catchiness of Pavement’s one true MTV hit, while Maija Sofia’s cover of Silver Jews’ nostalgic folk song “Pretty Eyes” sounds eerily like the work of Cat Power, another era legend.

No artist sticks around longer than a single song, yet everything fits together with a sense of cohesion. Boreens & Backroads plays like a mixtape you once made a love interest to flex your incredible taste. But the album is not monochromatic. Experimental Dublin artist Katie Gerardine O’Neill gives an Aphex Twin-nodding cover of “Suffering Jukebox”. Sneak Past Demons pull off the neat trick of replicating the central guitars that propel the original “Elevate Me Later” with what sounds like fiddles, while Cormorant Tree Oh offers a gothic interpretation on the classic “Stop Breathin”.

Most unusual is Enola Christ Metalizer’s take on “Brinx Job”. The original, from Pavement’s album Wowee Zowee, is an idiosyncratic little oddity featuring singer Stephen Malkmus repeatedly squawking, “We got the money”. Using this as a jump off, Metalizer creates an audio collage of laser beam synths and what appears to be a text-to-speech app that impersonates various US presidents reciting the lyrics. (I know, I know. For sure, the tangential ways AI is used in music-making requires scrutiny.) It’s a 79-second slap that, coming in the middle of the record, feels like a half-time interlude.

Despite being a covers record, Boreens & Backroads at times appears to nod towards the news cycle. It’s natural to link Fly Parts’ selection of a song titled “How to Rent a Room” to Ireland’s never-ending housing crisis. And “Frontwards”, released by Pavement in 1992 and now performed by Cork group Twitcher, features a lyric that captures the sense of limbo, and hostility, facing many asylum in this country: “And in the migrant hotels, they never sleep, they never will/ Their souls are crumbling like a dirt clod, hold/ Your cigarette cuts to the inside.”

Prophetic words once penned by a California band that fits a system long past being fit for purpose.