Porters, The – “A Tribute to Arthur Guinness ” – [Knock Out Records]

Here’s a shamrock shake for you all, with a beer chaser and a whiskey
floater and an Irish coffee in a German biergarten? The Porters (among
them “Volker O’Porter” and “Sascha O’Porter” and Olaf) are a German
equal opportunity band…spending equal amounts of time in pubs and
listening to old Pogues records. As well as other old Gaelic ditties.
This is largely a cover record, and a tribute to Arthur Guiness. It
gives me a bit of a hangover…often taking numbers and boiling them
down to their cabbage basics of I-IV-V and ratcheting them up with
straight-ahead rock. They lack some of Shane MacGowan’s subtlety,
Marc O’Porter’s vocals do have a pretty nice shambled brogue with an
interesting flavor…a little more grimace in it. Nice… There’s
dabs of pennywhistle, and some pretty nice banjo work buried under
chomp-chomp-chomp guitar. A couple of ballads (“The Green Fields of
France” and “Whiskey on a Sunday”) fall flat as the town drunkard,
but they do sort of let the room stop spinning from the chomp-chomping
for a bit. And some people set their clocks by that drunkard’s fall,
so have at it. I think this might be enjoyed best in moderation,
or perhaps surrounded by a bunch of sweaty, happy Germans. I think
that’s why I like the “Pub Version” of “The Leaving of Liverpool”
on this best…it gets rid of the patent-pending ‘rock and roll’
geetar, and it feels more like its happening in the corner watering
hole…and Christina sings like Sunday morning on it against Marc’s
Shane/Popeye grimace. Ich bin eine Eire-liner.

-Seamus All