Robocobra Quartet interview

Ask almost anyone in the Northern Ireland music community to name the most under-appreciated band in the region and you’ll hear the same name over and again: Robocobra Quartet. Led by drummer/vocalist Chris W. Ryan, they have been mainstays on the live music circuit for a decade now, performing a freewheeling collision of loose jazz and driving post-punk. Their third album, Living Isn’t Easy, is their most cohesive body of work to date, melding the two poles of the band’s musical identity into one fearsome, steamrolling juggernaut.

There are – for now – six permanent members of this so-called 'quartet', although for each performance they stick strictly to a rotating four-musician lineup. Just as the personnel vary from night to night, so too do the flavours of music on offer: one week they can be playing in a concert hall at a bespoke European jazz festival, the next in a sweaty underground bunker of an indie venue, both equally natural homes for what they do. Their enviable live reputation stems from their willingness to embrace the infinite possibilities that on-stage improvisation can offer, and for the new album, they channel that stage version of the band into the studio setting.

“I love hardcore and punk bands like Bad Brains and the Ramones who made killer debut albums that they recorded in a day, because it was just their live show,” says Ryan. “The live thing is usually where we really win fans, so this time we thought, why don’t we really try to capture some of that energy that we have when we play together.”

It makes for an intoxicating listen, where tracks can swing from a vibrant, jaunty skip to a crashing, swirling headspin on a whim. Ryan’s vocals, meanwhile, are delivered in such spoken, conversational tones that the listener can feel as though they are intruding on his personal diary entries. “Sometimes the spoken word can be quite melodramatic or artificial,” says Ryan, “but for me, I just love all those little interesting things about the voice when we speak to each other. I like mining those adages and colloquialisms.”

Far from a contrived style, Ryan’s delivery serves to accentuate the lyrical themes that dominate Living Isn’t Easy: the helplessness associated with navigating a way through late-stage capitalism as a young creative, the crushing reality of the housing crisis and, most pointedly, the mental health pandemic (the band members’ own antidepressant doses were etched into the runout groove of the 7” release of the single Wellness). “I’m actually quite a positive person,” Ryan argues. “I have this optimistic nihilism. What makes me comfortable is that nothing matters, and so there is freedom in that.”

It is an attitude that explains the album’s centrepiece, Chromo Sud, on which our protagonist wails against the impossibility of owning his own home over an agitated, taut arrangement, before the track blossoms into an expansive, freeform maelstrom of warring saxophones in a therapeutic, cleansing and ultimately joyful relief of tension. It is the one track where the band allowed for substantial in-studio improvisation and it reaps dividends. 

“Chromo Sud is very much a catharsis,” says tenor saxophonist Thibault Barillon. “I didn’t approach it intellectually as such, it’s about what it feels like.”

“For me, you’ve got to have positivity,” replies Ryan. “A lot of our stuff has light and shade. We’re not a gothic band, there might be moments of weight, but there will be moments of light and levity too, that’s just what life is like.”

The band, who formed while studying at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast, have a mischievous ‘no guitar’ policy to their membership. “Guitars can be used for good or evil,” Ryan explains. “Look at Richard Dawson and his beautiful use of guitar, but then look at fucking Ed Sheeran or a billion boring, shite guitar bands that are bland and recreating something from the 70s. Anyone can play guitar, but why don’t they play harp? Try something else! If you spend your whole life eating McDonald’s, why not try some Korean food or go to the Asian supermarket?”

Robocobra Quartet’s music instead revels in its bass and saxophone leads, and the precious spaces in between. Ryan’s full-time work as a music producer and engineer – he has helmed recent projects by fellow Irish bands Just Mustard, NewDad and Enola Gay – heightens his appreciation for the minutiae of recorded music and, as he puts it, the musical Trojan Horse, or “stealing little interesting ideas from the avant-garde and encasing them into what we are.”

That embrace of the experimental mindset, along with the band’s particular combination of styles, makes it no surprise that they were cited as an early influence by the all-pervasive Black Country, New Road, a link the band are more than comfortable with. “When we were trying to sell our first album,” says Ryan, “nobody knew how to describe our music. Now, it’s like, cool, it sounds like Squid or Black Country, New Road. If it pushes people forward into being interested in strange new music, then let’s do it. I’m happy to be the Daniel Johnston to someone else’s Nirvana.”

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Living Isn't Easy is out now via First Taste Records
Robocobra Quartet play Broadcast Glasgow on 28 Aug