Empire's 'not fully realised' is a very Dublin sort of record.
And it's not the nice Dublin, not open, friendly and inventive Frames Dublin but the shallow self-regard and pompous elitism of U2 Dublin. Shit, for a place with so little to shout about in musical terms (Redneck Manifesto? For fuck's sake) the big smoke is awfully sure of itself and of its treasured status as an important 'Cultural' centre.
There's a perception there, one is inclined to think, that anyone who can play the guitar and doesn't sell a lot of records is some sort of undiscovered genius. But if the truly awful blandness and subdued commercialism of the likes of David Kitt and Mundy is the best the fair city can come up with, it may be time for a rethink.
And anyway, as Louis Walsh will be only too glad to tell you, most people whose records don't sell particularly well don't do so for the very good reason that they're crap.

Empire is a 'beats collective' consisting of a guy who used to play bass in Rollerskate Skinny and two guys who didn't. 'not fully realised' is their first release and has gathered excellent reviews in the Dublin media.
Which is unfortunate really, because it's a bad record, a patently bad record, and if the two-bit mandarins at the Hot Press or the illiterate monkeys at The Sunday Tribune can's see this (or indeed, don't want to see it) then music in this country is in a considerably worse state than it need necessarily be.

Kicks off with 'welcome', a harmless twist of miscellaneous electronica that doesn't feel the need to challenge anyone very much and heads sharply downhill thereafter, 'life without music' being the kind of mindless big-beat, sample-heavy ("yeah baby!") shit that gave this genre such a bad name in the first place.
Elsewhere, on tracks like 'electronically tested' and 'leafy suburbs', it slips into the trap of many a lazy electronic record of yore, where the errant knob-twiddlers think its enough to come up with one small phrase and repeat it ad nauseam for four and a half minutes. Kids, it isn't. And it don't help when the phrase in question ain't a particularly inspired one in the first place.
The fast, piano-driven funk of 'home-based situation' and the tasty 'dishy lover' are better, very early bentley Rhythm Ace, while the smooth hip-hop chic of 'be happy be safe' bops to the beat of a million insipid trendy bars.
'A little kiss will make it better' tries to be a bit more avant-garde. It's all scratchy foreign samples, mild feedbacky noises and discordant organs that waft in and out of the mix like an idea that seemed, like, really cool when you were stoned, man.
Of the closers, 'little something' sounds worryingly like the music in the last Surf ad (in which case maybe Lever Bros. will give them their money back) while the stop-start, frog-sampling 'trust in me' sounds like it's trying really, really hard to be a Boards of Canada track. Final track 'half asleep' tries to pull a Serge Gainsbourg (uuuhhhhhh!) before breaking into a weird, sub-Radiohead tinkling noise that sounds as half-hearted and unsure of what it's supposed to be doing as befits the album as a whole.

It ain't all that bad really, a bit sub-moby (before he sold 95 billion copies of the woeful 'Play'), a tad faux-fatboy in its happier moments and generally sounds like it was hammered together by an imaginative 14-year-old with a couple of e-jays and a working knowledge of windows. The really worrying thing is the slavering reception that the album recieved on initial release. If the Dublin media want to support Irish music, that's all fine and good but they need to rmember that in championing everything they champion nothing. The pervading attitude that any old shit will do and the misguided assumption that Irish music is a Good Thing by dint of its very existence is what has us in the state we're in.

Truth be told, 'not fully realised' amounts to little more than a bunch of unoriginal and tedious demos that really should have stayed on someone's hard drive and anyone who really wants to foster genuine Irish talent would do well to ignore it.
If this is the best that the incestuous Dublin scene can produce then it's really starting to look like the intellectually lazy, culturally bankrupt and artistically irrelevant place that us begrudging culchies always suspected it was in the first place.