Deep thinkers can come from the strangest places. Ringsend are a case in point. You could listen to Sunday Brunch at the Gentlemen's Club thirty times through and never suspect that there was some substance bubbling beneath it all if you didn't stop and let the lyrics' stories play out in your mind. This is largely due to the fact that Ringsend sounds like some sort of stock background music for homey barbecue joints and sparsely-populated blues clubs. I bet these guys could make a killing cutting tunes for Chili's commercials -- it's not hard to picture a James Earl Jones type waxing poetic about a slab of baby back ribs and onion fries with Ringsend's generically rocking din sauntering along in the background.

This is definitely a cry back to rock's simpler days, when the songs consisted of country, blues and a smidgen of jazz standards knotted together and made more dangerous by prominent backbeats. There are occasional nods to the seventies in a couple of cranking guitar solos, and "Photograph Love" sounds like lots of really bad nineties alterna-riffraff, but the music is still essentially traditional rock and roll that could have been made 45 years ago, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, the fact that the songs are sluggish and unimpressive is.

But the lyrics -- they're another story. Penmen Chris Edwards and Joshua Harvey have a keen ear for beauty and truth, collecting their thoughts on moving artwork ("Air Bourne Earth Bound (Wonderful)") and persevering love ("Guernica") in an understandable, relatable manner not unlike Mineral/The Gloria Record's Chris Simpson (a strange comparison, I know). Doubt bubbles over in "Photograph Love" and "Piety Thieves", and by the album's end, multiple common human experiences are touched on and given a fresh voicing. Sure, not all of the lyrics are solid -- see "Jamie"'s limp chin-up, head-high exhortations -- and these gentlemen still aren't on par with Dylan or even Simpson, but many an indie rock band could stand to take a few notes from Ringsend on effective verbal communication. Sadly, the music still sucks, so these words are sung practically in vain.