Formed during lockdown by producer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and all-round Limerick indie king Chris Quigley, The Personal Vanity Project is a new proposition sourced from high-spec parts in drummer/vocalist Brendan McInerney (Bleeding Heart Pigeons) and James Reidy (His Father’s Voice) on keyboards/space FX.
Quigley gave us the full scoop: “The starting point was me hearing about this rumoured Kevin Shields drum’n’bass record that was never released, which left me thinking, ‘Oh I wonder what that would have sounded like?’. Terrible, really bad. So I made a few bits, but gradually found myself drifting towards something more interesting – which was this spacier stuff for guitar and string machine. As this continued and my previous band, Cruiser, was put on ice, I quickly became a billy-no-mates with seven nonsensical demos and no band.”
Having written “fairly aimlessly” up to then, the three played with these little scraps of music to figure out what worked and began to build songs out of them. “We enjoyed hanging out and working through tunes, and as we began to hit a stride, songs started coming together really quickly. We did our first show later that year.”
You unfortunately can’t hear them yet, but expect to soon; expect flourishes of the more experimental, motorik and spaced-out indie rock touchstones like Sonic Youth, Stereolab and Spacemen 3. They just recorded ten songs in five days in Start Together Studios with Chris Ryan (Robocobra Quartet, Just Mustard), with final touches currently being made and a release date scheduled for later this year. “Once we’ve that over, we’ll be hitting the road a bit more,” says Quigley. “And I’ll have to start making more badly-named demos.” Stevie Lennox
Photo by Aoife Moloney
