Music
The best kept secret in music
Press
THE WALLS – ‘NEW DAWN BREAKING’ - ALBUM REVIEW QUOTES 2005
“it contains the best work of their career” – SUNDAY TIMES
“an immediately impressive record on almost every level....well worth the wait” – HOT PRESS
“The Walls have always possessed an organic aura that makes them so darn likeable and they’ve successfully imbued this glow into the making of the record giving it that homely Wilco feeling…an album full of hooks, catchy choruses and stomping tunes”. TOTALLY DUBLIN
“New Dawn Breaking should put this hard-working band back where they belong - bringing down the house, as well as holding up the ceiling. The Stunning? No way, this is more of a first time buyers' investment”. – ENTERTAINMENT.IE
“Super-charged with the idea of starting afresh, at its best 'New Dawn Breaking' has an urgency about it which proves infectious. The wait was worth it”. RTE.IE
“Long-awaited and highly anticipated, this album is all it was promised to be. The twelve tracks bring us from sheer ecstasy to extreme sadness and right back again”. – LIMERICK EVENT GUIDE.
“A massive return to form..”- SUNDAY WORLD MAGAZINE
- Various
Discography
SINGLES AND EP'S:
The Night I called it a Day - single
Something's Wrong - single
Broken Boy - EP
Some kind of a Girl - single
Bone Deep - single (radio and internet only)
To the Bright and Shining Sun - single
Drowning Pool - EP
Passing Through - single (radio and internet only)
ALBUMS:
Hi-Lo
New Dawn Breaking
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
In the basement venue of a Dublin bar, Steve and Joe Wall were dealing with serious stage fright as they hadn’t stood on a stage in over four years since the demise of their previous band The Stunning. It was Sept 1998 and this was The Walls first gig. They were one of the first bands in the country to set up their own label, releasing a string of singles and an EP before their debut album Hi-Lo was released in May 2000.
In the summer of 2001 one of those rare music business occurrences happened. The band sent four copies of the album to U2 and a month later received a call saying that they loved it and would The Walls be interested in supporting U2 at their second sold-out concert in Slane Castle. That day the band played to their biggest crowd to date – around 80,000 people.
‘To the Bright and Shining Sun’ was the band’s next single and their most successful to date, reaching number 11 in the Irish charts. It was also featured on a prominent TV advertising campaign. It was the most-played song by an Irish band on radio during the summer of 2002 and the band toured relentlessly on the back of it. That June the band were also invited to support the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Landsdowne Rd. stadium in Dublin.
In February 2004 long time member Carl Harms decided to leave the band to pursue his own musical interests and a new member, bassist Jon O’Connell was added to the line-up.
In March 2004 The Walls and Dublin 9-piece band The Jimmy Cake embarked on a two week tour of some of the new EU accession states: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The tour was a sort of rock’n’roll handshake to the new EU members and was a great success. They played brand new material every night, to audiences who had never seen or heard of the band and this gave them the freedom to test out the new songs without any pressure or expectations. Out went the samples, loops and backing-tracks, it was just guitars plugged into amps and the emphasis was on the songs and the spirit. This tour played a large part in their approach to the new album.
The band had been listening to a lot of very diverse musical styles from - Howling Wolf… Leadbelly… Muddy Waters through to Link Wray…..Elvis…. Johnny Cash…. Dylan… Hendrix….Gram Parsons…. Them….The Velvet Underground….The Stooges…..Bowie. The music of Levon Helm and The Band was particularly influential and The Clash’s - London Calling was almost worn out. The vinyl crackled on Soul records by Ike and Tina Turner, Candi Staton and Bettye Swann and Lee Dorsey. Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s “Safe as Milk” was a rarely off the stereo. The Kings of Leon were also regarded as a breath of fresh air. The group wanted to make an album that was honest, real and not driven by any trends or hype. An album that would reflect the time and place they were living in.
In April 2004 they went to Studio Black Box in France to record the basic tracks with producer and ex-The Frames member David Odlum. They wanted to make an album that was about capturing the magic of a great live performance - four people in a room doing take after take and trying not to lose the soul of the music in the process. The final overdubs were done in the bands own studio in Dublin before returning to France to mix it.
In Oct 2004 they released a taster, The Drowning Pool EP to bridge the gap till the album release the following spring. Drowning Pool, a blistering, spleen-venting, blues explosion, two minutes fifty two seconds in length took people by surprise and divided opinion, exactly what the band wanted. It showed that there were changes afoot in The Walls camp.
Originally scheduled for a release date in Sept 2004 The Walls decided to hold their album until the New Year. U2 were releasing an album that autumn and according to Steve ‘we thought that it would be a fair and gentlemanly gesture to stand back momentarily and give them a fair crack of the whip, so to speak.’
The band decided to call the album New Dawn Breaking after the final and longest track on the record and Passing Through was chosen as the single to precede the album’s release. The album got it’s Irish release on May 27th 2005 and went straight into the Irish charts at No.5.
www.thewalls.ie
contact@thewalls.ie
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