Our favourite Czech Republican Celtic-Punk band Foggy Dude are back with an amazing studio EP of seven songs to follow last years Pub 10 live recording.
These guys came to our attention last year with the release of Pub 10 a live EP of five songs recorded at their favourite Prague pub. Sadly for them, being live, it wasn’t eligible to be included in our end of year Best Of’s or else it would have definitely featured so impressed were we. Recorded ‘warts’nall’ it really captured this talented band perfectly so I was delighted to hear they were still going and had recorded new material.
Foggy Dude (great name!) were formed in the Summer of 2017 by a group of friends who were studying at Strahov Technical University in the Czech Republic capital of Prague. In their earliest days 
they were a 8-piece gigging round the local student/punk scene in Prague at mainly the Vagon Rock club, 007 club Strahov and, what would become their spiritual home, the Block 10 Pub. A few years later they may no longer be students but they can still be found hanging around the pubs of Strahov. As any Celtic-Punk fan will tell you it’s next to impossible to keep that many people together long term and so it proved as people have come and gone from the band and no sooner had they released Pub 10 then two members up and left. Foggy Dude have risen to the challenge though and now a mere 7-piece instead of bringing in a singer they now share the vocal duties among the band. A very novel and commendable approach.
A wise man once said: Do you know why you should drink more? Because more ain’t less! Or so the story goes according to Ilia, who decided to demonstrate said proverb to us one drunken night at Pub 10. Since then, we took it to our hea… livers, as we got through many more drunken nights. We wrote some songs, we sang them loud for the entire drinkery to hear and thus this album came about. – Taken from the album notes.
More Ain’t Less begins with ‘Raise Your Glass’ and Ilia, the fiddle player takes on the main vocal in a tribute to The Dreadnoughts. So impressed by the Canadians love of sea-shanties (they recorded a whole album not long back) they decided to write one themselves to open shows so only right it should open here too. Next up is bass player Jirka and a song he wrote in the Himalayas (!) about the small things in life sometimes being the most enjoyable. In this case being in the Himalayas and missing a pint in your favourite bar with your friends.
“I sailed the deepest ocean
and climbed the greatest mountains
I know what is the life
I slept with many girls
and beat a lot of men
I know what is the life”
Great words and musically it’s bloody fantastic too. Great fiddle and a tune to die for. Five minutes of pure unabashed kick-arse Celtic-Punk party music. Catchy beyond words. All I can say is you’ll just have to check it out yourselves.
Cába of the mandolin sings ‘Hunt For Leprechaun’ and it’s actually the very first song ever written by the band about having your gold stolen by a leprechaun and then gaining your revenge. Again it’s a belter of a song and as catchy as hell. Word is they only wrote this song as they wanted to shout “NOW THE GOLD IS IN HIS ASS” in public! This is one hell of a bunch of talented guys and I don’t just mean musically either as they next turn their hand to an instrumental and ‘Felfire Dance’ includes two jigs both written by the band. The origins of the song lay in the time Cába was studying in Ireland. Jirka is back next for ‘Old Man’ and a sad tale but told with amazing gusto and such a uplifting Eastern influenced tune. A old man slaves his life away breaking his back till he can work no more and on finding his life in ruins finds solace in the bottom of a glass.
“Once there was an old man,
in a grotty pub, siting alone
and he had a story to tell
I got one bottle of whiskey
and I sunk across the table”
We see plenty of these old fella’s in the Irish community but truth be told they are everywhere and they built everything. Cába is back on vocals for ‘You Didn’t Even Appear At All’ and a more straight up Punk track but still with all the Celtic instrumentation. Based on a habit of old singer Sam to leave funny messages on peoples phones when angry or drunk or drunk and angry. The EP ends with another fine instrumental ‘Slainte Pico’ of two Foggy Dude original compositions.
Altogether this is a really wonderful release and it really made my day. With a pile of releases to get through of mostly Folky stuff it was an absolute pleasure to get this and it ended up taking over my day so good was it. The only disappointment here is that their is not more of it! The balance struck between Folk and Punk and Trad is perfect as is the production and it comes with the best booklet I’ve seen on any release this year. If we did give marks out of ten then put More Ain’t less down for a 9!
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LONDON CELTIC PUNKS WEB-ZINE 
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