The Mission Sessions: Those Nervous Animals – debut album

Stranger things have happened, but for a distant-memory Irish group to emerge during a pandemic only to deliver their debut album after 40 years is not just taking the biscuit but swallowing it whole.

Sligo-based Those Nervous Animals are less of an anomaly now than they were in 1981. Back then (gather around me, my children, no pushing), they arrived on the Irish music scene with two disadvantages: they weren’t from Dublin and one of the members played fretless bass (manna from heaven for sneery cognoscenti raised on a low-slung guitar diet of The Ramones and sniffing out the next U2).

The songs, also, took some time to get used to, with their tangible musicianship and familiarity with Steely Dan and Talking Heads. A different time and place tells a different tale, of course, and listening to the band now (across material that has spanned and developed over the decades) it transpires that many people didn’t know, in a manner of speaking, their arses from their elbows.

Tracks such as The Business Enterprise (My Friend John), Insomnia, Damien, and Just What the Sucker Wanted ooze varying states of funkiness – more Hall & Oates than Rip Rig + Panic - that have travelled well. Meanwhile, a more recent, quite splendid song, Bird, conjures up an altogether serene sonic template of what might come next.

thosenervousanimals.ie