| Format: | 12" |
| Availability: | In stock |
Heavyweight 12" vinyl record. Features remixes by Andrew Innes (Primal Scream) & Brendan Lynch (Lynch Mob/Paul Weller) and Keith Tenniswood (2 Lone Swordsmen/Radioactive Man).
Belfast’s Deeply Armed have been making subterranean waves for a while now, with tracks being passed around serious heads via various samizdat channels. Andrew Weatherall was an early booster. David Holmes dropped an incredible psychedelic remix that was played out live on specific ritual occasions – Convenanza, God’s Waiting Room, Manifesto of Bliss – but now the trio finally break cover with a three-track 12” that combines deep soul with Krautrock grooves and a rock and roll heart.
Deeply Armed feature Michael McKeown on vocals, guitar, synth and percussion, Aaron O’Neill on electronics, synth and engineering and Kenny Whaley on bass and synth. Coming together on Belfast’s underground club scene, the trio have birthed a unique hybrid sound, long worked-over, a sound that combines analogue garage band smarts with a blissed-out Balearic feel and a commitment to extending endless grooves way over the event horizon. Think Neu! tripping on a Northern Soul loop with Sonic Boom setting the controls for the heart of the sun.
The group are committed to recording live in analogue in order to capture spontaneous magic. The beautiful backing vocals on the A side – “The Healing (Original)” – feature two sisters from Donegal, Sinead Smyth and Mairead Smyth, singing live, into one mic, with the only instructions being to sing “with feeling”. McKeown likens the process to The Everly Brothers and it’s an inspired comparison, with a loose country soul vibe that adds to the slow-burning euphoria and affirmative yea-saying of a track that insists that Deeply Armed, indeed that music itself, brings the healing, a sentiment that goes down just as well in the heart of the dancefloor as it does between the cans of your headphones. And when drummer Saul Rayson cuts the motorik trance with some military-style breakdowns it bolsters the feel of body music for deep listening.
For “The Healing (Born to Go Mix)” Andrew Innes and Brendan Lynch bring a trash-glam aesthetic that is pure electro punk, dubbing their own instruments over the original in a way that reflects that OD catastrophe vibe of Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR with Innes’s daughter Dee Dee providing psychedelic doo-wop backing vocals that once again situate the track downwind of swooning 50s/60s rock and pop.
Keith Tenniswood’s mix is something else entirely. This is lover’s rock, or lover’s trance, perhaps, as Tenniswood – one half of Two Lone Swordsmen alongside Andrew Weatherall – adds a hypnotic glockenspiel refrain that has all of the brain-razzing appeal of Terry Riley’s all-night flights and cuts it with a hazy, narcotic Kraut groove and a stoned House atmosphere to generate the kind of timeless euphoria that you might wanna live inside forever.
With their debut 12” Deeply Armed announce themselves as a singular presence on the fringes of electronic underground sound, hallucinating the kind of phantom dancefloor moves that would reconcile the version, the loop and the live jam with the kind of audacious pop elan of a dream Phil Spector/Dennis Bovell/Conny Plank mega mix.
At times like these we could all do with a little healing, and Deeply Armed are the ones to bring it. Look out for live activity in 2025 and more versions drawn from the trio’s endlessly deep take on eternal pop tones and radical positivity.
David Keenan
January 2025
