B-Side Guys

There’s a particular kind of restlessness that has nothing to do with where you are and everything to do with the habit of looking over your shoulder at where you’re not. Basciville, the Wexford-born brothers who have spent years as quiet powerhouses in the Irish music scene, built “Saintmaking” around that feeling and then wrote a song about refusing to let it win.

“Calling yourself out on your shit and giving something an honest go” is how the band describes it, which is refreshingly unromantic for a track with textured production and soaring vocals that could easily mistake itself for something more cosmic. The slow-burning intensity earns its weight precisely because the target is internal rather than external, not a broken world but a broken habit of mind, the tendency to romanticize what’s out of reach at the expense of what’s actually in front of you.

The folk-rock framework here draws from late-90s Radiohead and Jeff Buckley in its willingness to let arrangements breathe before they crescendo, and the production, handled by the duo themselves, reflects their experience working with Susan O’Neill and Ailbhe Reddy. There’s an economy to it that keeps the emotional scale from tipping into indulgence.

“Saintmaking” arrives ahead of their second album Love In The Time Of The State, due March 13th via Faction Records, an album framed around the question of how you write a love song when you’re disgusted with the world. This single suggests their answer involves clearing out the noise in your own head first. The romanticization of what’s passing you by is its own kind of displacement, and the decision to stop doing it, even temporarily, is what the song is actually celebrating.