Dean: “Supergroup” Chuck Squires make country music that’s shamelessly nostalgic

A Dublin variant of the Travelling Wilburys, anyone? Press notes announcing the arrival of Chuck Squires describe the band as an “exciting new project, which some may refer to as a supergroup”. And why not? Each member has done some very worthy things in the local scene. There’s David Tapley, feather-touch frontman of the eternally underrated alternative rock group Tandem Felix; Daniel Fitzpatrick writes open-hearted tunes under the name Badhands.

They’re joined by Chris Barry, seasoned engineer, touring musician and head of Ailfionn Studios. Completing the line-up is drummer Ken Mooney of The Mary Wallopers. They are, according to those same notes, among the city’s “most revered songwriters, musicians and producers”. When titans like this unite under one flag, they must be judged on whether the music adds up to the sum of the band’s parts.

Supergroups don’t always work out like they should. Monsters of Folk – made up of genre stars Conor Oberst, M. Ward, Mike Mogis and Jim James – recorded just one album and left no discernible pop culture footprint. And the question of how Dr. Dre, Nas, Foxy Brown et al fumbled their much-hyped 1990s rap collective The Firm continues to keep hip-hop scholars awake at night. But the Chuck Squires project seems to be built on a clear motivation: a mutual love for classic country music. Their new album The Late Great Chuck Squires consists of songs that individual members have been hoarding for years – material just waiting to be developed when the scenario was just right.

As you might have detected from the band’s inflated declarations, they are having fun with this. There is even a backstory: Chuck Squires, they say, is the group’s elusive leader, unseen as he’s on the lam from pursuing cops and debt collectors. (It’s a yarn that immediately reminded me of the project released in 2020 that was purported to be a lost ’70s LP by Jeremiah Sand, the cult leader from the movie Mandy, dropped with a crazy backstory with no acknowledgment that the whole thing was, y’know, fiction.)

Here’s the thing, though: The band’s sense of humour runs counter to the fact that The Late Great Chuck Squires is an album that evokes classic Americana of a certain vintage. Unlike CMAT’s wry but loving update of Nashville, Chuck Squires’ nostalgia for country music is straight down the line. The vocals are shorn of any detectable Irishness to instead mimic the cadences of the throwback Southern stars of transistor radio. Cowboy hats are the assigned uniform; the colour palette is autumnal. The song “Saturday Morning (Makes a Fool Out of Me)” literally contains the lyric, “I hear the train a-comin’”.

Rejecting the more precise production habits of their previous work, the band keep things as simple as possible. Arrangements feel appropriately rickety, with everything covered in a thin layer of dust. But the easy-going nature of The Late Great Chuck Squires doesn’t obscure the high level of musicianship being displayed by a group in complete harmony with one another.

Take the excellent opener “One Last Roll of the Dice”, written and sung by Fitzpatrick. The piano is jaunty, the slide guitars sing, and the melody is warm and welcoming. This is music for a bar that serves just two drinks: beer and whisky. Equally comforting is Tapley’s Neil Young-jacking “Walk on By”, while “Pissed it All Away” covers classic country subject matter: a down-on-his-luck bum stewing on regrets (“I want to know where the love is gone/ Or if it’s really real at all, good Lord”).

Leaning into a more cinematic vision of the Wild West, “I’ll Wait On” is reminiscent of both the movie scores of Ennio Morricone and the band Shivaree’s dusty turn-of-the-millennium hit “Goodnight Moon” in its ability to conjure widescreen images of lonely cowboys and suns setting across frontiers. And in the chipped guitar chords of “Pink Buffalo”, I can detect The Beatles’ expansions into the same acoustic country sounds that Chuck Squires now take inspiration from. (As a matter of fact, Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back docuseries has been cited as an influence over the project.)

Yet there are occasions when the band feel confident in warping their influences. Most ambitious is “That Nightlife!”, penned by Tapley, which begins as a relatively simple ditty before the guitars, piano, bass and drums gradually intensify, elevating the arrangement beyond the dusty trail and into the stratosphere. These contortions add fascinating extra ripples to The Late Great Chuck Squires, but the selling point here is the timeless fundamentals, lovingly handled with cowhide leather gloves.

The Late Great Chuck Squires is released on Thursday 28 May, with the band performing at The Workman’s Club the following night.