The Bad Arts 015: Search Results
The Dublin-based two-piece discuss their excellent second record Go Mutant, reveal which Search Results song gives them the creeps and recall the best and worst meals they've had on tour.
Every once in a while, a band comes around that reinstates your faith in music. Ages ago, a friend (later namechecked in this chat for having great food recommendations, which is true) was excitedly talking about Search Results, who he’d seen live and really loved. From that moment on, a mention of Search Results was just as inevitable from him as a passing comment on a notable curry or greasy spoon he’d recently enjoyed. Naturally, I was curious because all the meals and restaurants this friend introduced me to are ones I think about all the time. Ross Hamer, with you around, I’ll never need a Zagat guide. He also makes great music as Hamer Place, which I couldn't recommend enough.
When I finally saw Search Results live for the first time, I was completely taken aback by the unwavering vibrancy and breadth of their songs and musicianship. At the core of their material is a communal spirit, conveyed through the fun each member is having while performing. It’s infectious and makes you feel like watching your friends play at a house party. That compelling streak to Search Results live shows is as prevalent and inherent to their enthralling lo-fi recordings. The way they capture their vocals and instruments has a sort of urgency that lends to their character and makes me think back to recording my favourite songs from the radio on a cassette or reading stories of bands making a limited run of tapes on a hot afternoon in their shed that were passed around local scenes back in the day.
Go Mutant, Search Results’ phenomenal second album and follow-up to their debut Information Blip (2023), heralds a new era for the band as a two-piece since the departure of their bassist Adam Hoban earlier this year. Going forward as a two-piece, the Dublin-based band’s dexterous arrangements were uncompromised by this new configuration as they’ve brought in Robbie Stickland on bass duties. On their latest LP, their sound continues to grow bigger and further-reaching in how they skillfully employ certain melodic and technical elements, deliver a variety of vocal stylings drawn from some their influences, which range from Yo La Tengo, On Cinema at the Cinema with Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, Animal Collective, Pavement amongst others.
For me, when I first stuck on Go Mutant-which I’ve listened to a lot and keep finding new favourite moments within-I was pleasantly surprised by how often the bright jangly guitars on ‘Amaray’ and ‘Nellypot’ reminded me of XTC, while ‘Too Much Time’ reminded me of O Emperor’s Jason. Much like finding your favourite lunch spot, where the owner will give you a genuine smile when you walk in the door, Search Results have managed to create a world —both in a live setting and in their LPs and EPs—where you can be guaranteed to feel welcome and be served with an more than satisfying experience that leaves you excited for your next visit.
Early on a Friday morning, I spoke to Fionn Brennan and Jack Condon via Zoom about the ways they changed things up while writing and recording their phenomenal second album Go Mutant, their best and worst food memories from touring and more. If you like Search Results and you enjoy learning new facts and knitting, you should subscribe to their newsletter Searching Resolutions!
TBA: Just before I got on this call, I realised it's been 5 months since your headline show in Whelan's. That only feels like yesterday!
Jack Condon: That feels like ages ago for us, or at least for me anyway! I suppose that’s because of the amount of things that have happened during that time from announcing the new album, Adam leaving the band and getting ready for all the tour stuff that's coming up. A lot of stuff has happened to us in the last few months.
TBA: How has it been for you since Adam left? Am I right in thinking that Search Results started from you two helping one another with your respective songwriting?
Jack Condon: Yeah, that’s true. It's been pretty easy. We haven't had to do too much differently. The only different thing is having Robbie [Stickland] on the bass for live shows. We're going to take him on the UK tour and it all sounds very good in the live context. With writing, the odd time here and there, we'd write each other's parts or give each other ideas. If Fionn wrote a song and was looking for a specific drum part or a bass part he'd tell me or Adam, same with me. It's just now we're playing them on the recordings. We started recording some songs for the next album and it's just a matter of recording the bass, that's the only different thing.
TBA: You’re already working on album three, that’s great!
Jack Condon: They build up quickly! This album that's about to come out has been finished for about a year. Things have built up in the meantime.
TBA: Tell me about making Go Mutant, did you mainly record it in a simialr way to previous releases?
Jack Condon: We finished Information Blip, or it came out in September, and I think we recorded [Go Mutant] around the same time we recorded that the year after, which was in February or March 2024, I guess?
Fionn Brennan: Yeah, over a year ago, I would say. We started recording it in the Orc’s Lair with Darragh Hansard, who did the first album with us. We were approaching it the same way and he did the base of the tracks, like the drums and stuff like that and we ended up keeping most of them or all of the drums, wasn’t it?
Jack Condon: Yeah, we thought it was just going to be demos but he got a really good sound for the drums so they just stayed.
Fionn Brennan: Yeah, and then I’d say it was over a period of a couple of months that, whenever we'd have time, we'd go and do some more. The first time we did it [with Information Blip] we did it in three days but with Go Mutant it was over a longer period, right Jack?
Jack Condon: Yeah because we had a lot more to do. We had finished all the songs with Darragh but then we decided to take a lot of bits out and redo them. There was some back and forth of ‘I don’t like the vocals on this thing, or I don't like the guitars on that song.’
Fionn Brennan: Oh yeah, and we ended up replacing bass parts with synth parts, as well. We also ended up doing a lot more listening because with the first album, we knew exactly how all the songs would be because they were more guitar-based with drums and with Go Mutant there was more space for us going, ‘Oh, what should we put here?’ and so it took a little longer.
TBA: Did you go into making this one with new foundational approaches or methods to how you recorded the tracks that you hadn’t done across your EPs and Information Blip?
Jack Condon: We're doing a lot of it, at least the recording, ourselves and we were doing it simultaneously with recording the Hot Night EP. Hot Night is very all over the place and we were trying all kinds of ideas. There are bits of that that bled into [Go Mutant], in terms of the recording, like small boring details about mic'ing techniques. We got a different guy to mix and master the album, Mikey Young, who was very good. I guess the writing process was the most different thing, though. Not so much the recording. We decided to write some songs that didn't have any guitars on them and songs that would be very out of our wheelhouse like ‘Hidden Hand’, which is very bare and there’s not much room for anything but the vocals. That was all very new and sometimes very scary for us to do.
TBA: ‘Hidden Hand’ is one of my favourites on the album. It's so pretty and, like you said, it brings something different. What were some of the most challenging songs to develop during these sessions that, when you finished them, made you feel invigorated to explore more in the future?
Jack Condon: ‘Be Laurel’ and ‘Steeplejacks’ were challenging. They were pretty much the same layout, we were able to play those live because it’s just drums and bass guitar but the structures of them were so strange, especially ‘Steeplejacks’. I remember Fionn coming in with both of those songs and it took me a long time to figure out what I could play on drums that would not chain it down but make the song make sense to me in the way that it did to him and his head. Those are crazy songs but I love playing them! That was kind of new because the structures of the songs on Information Blip were pretty predictable and standard, and that's fine, but this one's a bit more all over the place in a way that I really like.
Fionn Brennan: ‘Steeplejacks’ was very fun, but it kind of gives me the creeps.
Jack Condon: I think you can hear that you're having fun singing that song on the recording.
Fionn Brennan: That's probably the song I listened to the least because it’s just sort of annoying or something.
Jack Condon: That was the intention for it so it worked!
Fionn Brennan: I guess annoying in a way that I enjoy, I don't know how to describe it. That was just the way it happened as well because it wasn't meant to be, well, it was kind of meant to be like that. When we realised that it was hard to figure out, it ended up being something that we didn't take too seriously because there were probably five versions of that song. There was a lot of change in it.
TBA: There were five versions of it?!
Fionn Brennan: Probably, yeah! Usually, for me anyway, even if it's just a one-minute-long song, it'll sometimes take me a couple of months to bring it in to show Jack. At least it did this time around, it would take me so long to just bring a song to the band because I'd be constantly changing things with songs.
Jack Condon: Yeah, I mean how do you even try to finish a song like that?
Fionn Brennan: I don't know! We had this other song called ‘Abacus Rubicon’ and basically ‘Steeplejacks’ is half of what it initially was.
TBA: Are you holding on to the second half to work on at a later date?
Fionn Brennan: We'll record it at some stage.
Jack Condon: Yeah definitely, it’s just a matter of finding where it goes.
TBA: Jack, you’ve said “I've never felt that any of our recordings or live performances are the definitive version, they always change and grow. But I don't think it will ever work for us if we intentionally try to make a recording that captures the live sound, or inversely if we try to recreate the studio magic in a live scenario.”
With that, I’m curious to hear about the roles that time and spontaneity play in songwriting. Fionn, what you’ve said about it taking your time to bring the song to the band is so surprising to me because everything feels so instinctual and spontaneous. I always imagine Animal from The Muppets just thrashing a song out in a shed surrounded by his friends when I listen to your releases. The songs are always so great, and that’s clearly down to the care you put into them.
Jack Condon: That kind of is what it feels like when we record together! Especially recently, it's just all the tape machine and the laptop and too many cables all over the floor and we're running mics all over the place and running around doing one guitar take and being like, ‘Ah, it's fine’ and finishing it. We did a song a couple of weeks ago, that's going to be on the next album, that Fionn had never played for me before and we just recorded it five or ten minutes after he showed it to me and now that's going to be on the album. It's us both trying to figure out how it goes but we've done that before. ‘Enter The Blip’ was the same, the first track on the last album, was one that we had never played before we went into the recording studio. Fionn had just shown it to us on the spot and wrote lyrics coming into the studio on the bus that morning. I like that the best, getting a recording of something before it's road-tested, sometimes. Because sometimes you can find really good ideas for a song if you play it a lot live and maybe then think, ‘Ah, I should have done that in the recording.’
Fionn Brennan: It doesn't give you time to overthink it, as well, which is a good thing.
Jack Condon: Yeah, exactly, like taking too much stuff out or adding too much pointless stuff, whatever it is. I like the studio versions and the live versions to be two different things if they can. Unless it's a song like ‘Wrinkle’, which is a really fun song to play live that I don't think needs anything else. Then you just get the live sound of that for the studio recording which we kind of did. It changes but mostly, I prefer them to be different things.
TBA: Fionn, the press materials note how you did a course based on the voice with the Roy Hart Theatre and that you'd been going through a period of shyness. Was maybe part of why it would take you a long time to bring songs to the band? Did you find that the course brought more confidence into your vocal performance or allowed you to feel less self-conscious in your writing?
Fionn Brennan: The course was a Christmas present so it was an unexpected thing to do and at the same time the music I was listening to, I was listening to a lot of Animal Collective at the time and a lot of Young Fathers, who I'd just gotten into. That was good timing because both of those bands have a different approach than I had playing in Search Results, it wasn't anything like what I had done and it felt so far away from what I was doing that I wanted to incorporate a bit of it into my performance style. The course was great, it was the first time I'd done anything like that and I would like to apply some of the things I learned when I’m doing gigs. In terms of songwriting, though, I don't think it had too much of an effect on writing for Go Mutant. It rubbed off in a couple of songs like ‘I Was A Teenage Girlfriend’ and ‘Too Much Time’ because there was a chance for me not to play guitar and do something else. Otherwise, I think I've still been writing in the same way.
TBA: Mike Leigh’s Abigail's Party is also mentioned in the press release, which is such an amazing film. Who are some of the directors or films that have inspired the way you approach creating worlds and characters in your songs?
Fionn Brennan: I don't know how much I emulate it, but I’m a big Mike Leigh fan, I just love his characters and how they're just ordinary types of people and not really like any other movies because they're just sort of slices of life. Happy-Go-Lucky, is probably my favorite Mike Leigh movie. I have an aunt who's just like the main character in that. Nobody else does it like that, I don't think. I do find his film sort of inspiring. Again, I don't know how much like it comes into the songs, but that approach is really cool, I think.
David Lynch is a big one, too. I started getting into him over COVID. That sort of weird sincerity to all his characters, or at least Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, those kinds of characters, there’s such a strange sincerity to all of them. They're so curious about everything. I don't know if that's just Kyle MacLachlan, but especially that character Jeffrey is just so curious and wants to find stuff out. I like characters like that, ones that have a bit of a weird obsession.
TBA: Absolutely. You’re getting ready to go on tour and I always enjoy seeing all your adventures on the road on Instagram, especially when you share some of the food and meals you’ve had while on tour. What was the best and worst meal or sandwich you've had on the road?
Jack Condon: The worst one, in terms of sandwiches anyway, was probably that really posh one we got in Hackney, I think? It was really big and loaded with stuff but it had zero flavour at all and it was like 12 or 15 quid or something like that. It was awful!
Fionn Brennan: I got the vegan one.
Jack Condon: You probably had the most flavoursome one because it had a bit of spice in there or something.
Fionn Brennan: No, it wasn't good.
Jack Condon: It was upsetting. Whoever recommended that one, I can't remember who said we should go…
Fionn Brennan: Oh, I do remember who recommended it. It was a member of Fizzy Orange, I won't say who. Great music, terrible recommendations, food-wise.
Jack Condon: If you want good food recommendations, Ross Hamer is the guy or Jake Lennox. Jake sent me a Google Maps with a billion different restaurants from every city he’s been to. Which is pretty good if you're ever stuck. Ross's recommendations are always great, as well. Ross has been to a load of places, so he always takes us to the good spots.
Fionn Brennan: What was the name of the place in Amsterdam? Or what was the name of the thing? The fried, horrible…
Jack Condon: Oh, the croquettes?
Fionn Brennan: Yeah, the croquettes.
Jack Condon: Oh, shut up.
Fionn Brennan: There's a real divide there.
Jack Condon: That was amazing. I loved it.
Fionn Brennan: I felt horrendous after eating that.
TBA: Was it just a potato croquette?
Jack Condon: Well, they do beef croquettes over there.
Fionn Brennan: I don't think we went to the right place.
Jack Condon: No, no, we did.
Fionn Brennan: Okay, well, I don't think they tasted great. We had these little greasy croquette things but then we showed up to the venue and they had really fancy catering but we'd already eaten. They had lovely Indian food for us and it smelled so good and it was free! But we had those greasy croquette before going on stage.
TBA: I’d say it was good fun trying to keep your burps to a minimum while playing that set!
Jack Condon: We had a streak in 2022 or 23 of playing in Whelan’s or Anseo every month, just opening for someone or playing with college bands or something like that. Every time we’d play, we’d have a burger and that was just no good. Now it's a Yeeros every time and I think it's the best fast food in Dublin.
Fionn Brennan: I remember thinking, ‘Why am I always burping when I'm playing?’ Especially when we’d be playing upstairs in Whelan’s. I would be burping so much!
Jack Condon: Yeah, and if the lights hit your skin after you've eaten a burger, it just immediately creates a sheen!
TBA: Yeah, you become the patty on the fryer. Speaking of the best fast food in Dublin, have you had Chiya yet?
Jack Condon: Yes, we’ve Chiya.
Fionn Brennan: A couple of times, it’s so good.
Jack Condon: It gets all over you though but that’s alright.
Fionn Brennan: I got it before seeing the Flaming Lips the other day. The queue was going around Chiya. That was the greatest gig ever, I got a nice tote bag at it. It was the Yashimi tour. They’re just doing it randomly. I thought maybe it's an anniversary but it’s not. They just did a Yashimi tour. He did the bubble thing, there were maybe 10 bubbles out in the crowd. Oh, and I got this confetti thing. It's a pink robot. That was the confetti. They had these guys come out on stage who looked like PE teachers from American comedy movies wearing tight gym shorts that were also a onesie. They were coming out and moving stuff around and they got into these eyeball costumes. They had these huge cannons at the front of the stage for the confetti. It was so cool.
TBA: Oh, cool. Speaking of merch, Jack, you always have a great band t-shirt on when you're playing. I always enjoy the reveal of which one you’ll be wearing when you come out on stage. What one is your prized possession?
Jack Condon: Maybe this one [for The Point]
TBA: Unreal! Finally, what are some books, films or albums that you've been enjoying recently?
Jack Condon: The Cindy Lee record is really special to me. I’ve been listening to that all the time, like any time of day, it fits every type of mood and I’ve had a lot of really special moments listening to it since it came out. It's so long, as well, it’s over two hours, so there's so much going on in it. That one's pretty good. I watched The Jerk the other day, that's pretty good. I love that movie!
Fionn Brennan: I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
TBA: Oh, nice. I've never read it.
Jack Condon: Me too and I have it in my room ready to go and I've never braved it.
Fionn Brennan: I've just started it. It's great, I love it.
TBA: Have you seen the film adaptation?
Fionn Brennan: I haven't and I was trying not to find out who plays the people in it because I had my own picture of what they looked like. I was in a charity shop the other day and Viggo Mortensen was just sitting there on the shelf staring at me! Apparently, the movie's great. I tried to read Blood Meridian this year and stopped towards the end, I got so close to finishing it but just stopped because it just felt like it wasn't the right time. He's just so badass.
TBA: Before I say goodbye, I have to thank you for putting me on to Thinking Fellers Union Local 282.
Jack Condon: Oh my God. What a band!
TBA: I'd never listened to them before and I’ve been playing Strangers From The Universe and have been enjoying it.
Jack Condon: That's an incredible album. They have a great EP that came out just before or just after called Admonishing The Bishops and it's insane. It's only four songs but the amount that they do in like 15 minutes or so is crazy. I think they have two bassists as well which is very cool and sharing singers. I got really into that San Francisco slash Arizona scene in the 80s and 90s. There's a weird connection between San Francisco bands and Arizona bands with people who were punk adjacent like the Meat Puppets and Flipper and they kept coming up and then all the Neil Hamburger stuff, as well. I got this book about all of them after I saw Neil Hamburger for my work Christmas party. I got to talk to him afterwards and he was like, ‘Oh you know there's a book that I'm in. You should get it!’ And so I got it, and it was incredible. I was already kind of getting into Thinking Fellers but that blew my mind and everything they put out is like, well I haven't listened to everything they've put out because I don't want to speed-run their discography. I want to just pick an album and spend a lot of time with it which is maybe the best way to go about it because there's so much going on. Even if it's kind of bad sometimes, some of their songs are not that fun to listen to. But it's just really creative, they kind of seem like they've never heard pop music before but they're trying to do it.
TBA: Sort of like The Shaggs.
Jack Condon: Yeah, kind of like The Shaggs! They're just such a crazy band, I love them so much.
Fionn Brennan: I was listening to a Jad Fair album yesterday that reminded me of Thinking Fellers Union.
Jack Condon: Which one?
Fionn Brennan: I don't even think, not even the way it sounded but just the kind of chaos. It’s called Shake, Cackle, and Squall and it's just like what you're saying, where there are moments where you’re like, ‘Why am I enjoying this?! God bless that man, he's the best.