Cloud Castle Lake scale heights with ‘Malingerer’
Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell - [email protected]
A band whose music brings the work of Sigur Ros, Radiohead and Wild Beasts to mind, the Dublin-based outfit, Cloud Castle Lake play Róisín Dubh on Thursday, August 9. The group are Brendan William Jenkinson (guitar/piano), Rory O’Connor (bass), Daniel McAuley (vocals/synths) and Brendan Doherty (drums).
Jenkinson, O’Connor and McAuley began playing music together when they met in boarding school in Kildare.
“Being in boarding school, we had a fair amount of free time, and most of us didn’t really play sport, so music was the next thing,” Brendan says. “We just started jamming and playing cover songs, and that’s where it started. Then we started playing Dublin, the Electric Picnic and stuff like that, and Jim Carroll was writing about us in the Irish Times. We started taking it a bit more seriously.”
Daniel’s powerful voice, which frequently soars into an impressive falsetto, sets Cloud Castle Lake apart – but, initially, he wasn’t a member of the group.
“I started off as the manager when I was school, negotiating gigs in the school cafe and stuff like that!” he says. “One of the band heard me singing along to something on a stereo. We were looking for a singer at the time, and I ended up trying out in the school drum-shed. We kind of developed from there.”
How did he discover he could reach those high notes?
“How I got to sing so high was trying to emulate some of my influences at the time,” he says. “But we also reckon that it was because the room we practised in was so tiny, and when you’re 15 years old, you’re always trying to turn up your instrument the loudest, so instead of getting louder I just went higher.”
Daniel is pushing his voice to the limits of its range, which means he has to look after it well.
“For a very long time I didn’t, but for the last year and a half I’ve been going to a vocal coach,” he says. “I started going because you hear about people getting vocal node surgery and stuff, and I was just worried about the way I was singing. But I’ve ended up getting more out of it [the coaching] than I expected, like counter-tenor techniques, and old operatic ways of singing.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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