Ciarán

Ciarán at Scala

Róisín is an Irish girls’name that means ‘little rose’. A delicate, feminine name that at first seems at odds with Ciarán McDonald’s debut solo album. The music is confronting, sometimes confusing: tender one minute then brutal the next. Róisín is also the middle name Ciarán was to be given if he’d been born a girl, and it’s this line between the feminine and masculine that the record interrogates through pretty melodies coupled with warped, disconcerting sounds. Stepping out from the adolescent moniker Bearface, the one-time Brockhampton member took his time finding his sound, experimenting with styles and approaches until it felt right.

The title Róisín is part of the gentle reclamation of his own name, and his Irishness too. The result is a record that unfurls a little more every time you listen, a little rose growing its thorns and coming into bloom. The heart of Róisín came from a trip to New Jersey, when he and a bunch of friends and collaborators holed up in a cabin, messing about, making each other laugh and following any string that felt like it had potential. Found sounds, difficult distortion, playful crescendos that peak and disperse into menacingly quiet fuzz, Róisín is an album that simmers with a sense of boundless musical possibility, the sound of an artist breaking free of a pigeonhole. Ciarán revels in its imperfections, deliberately using pretty janky gear and finding meaning where the sound behaves erratically or a track zigs when you’re fully expecting a zag. As a record, Róisín is hard to classify. It has guitar on every track but you wouldn’t call it a guitar record. There are hints of R&B and rock, stacked and pitched vocals, lush harmonies and tender melodies rubbing up against harsh sounds and skewed production. Though a cast of friends and collaborators helped draw it out, what it absolutely is, is all Ciarán.