From Tooting, South London, Dignan Porch are brothers Joe and Sam Walsh plus close friends Ben Goodwin, Hayley Akins and Stephen Keane.
The band started as Joe’s home recording project, with Joe constructing his ‘warped fuzz-drenched sing-alongs’* on a basic Tascam 8-track. The music was a collage of ideas and layered melodies, touching on noise-pop, psychedelic garage rock and melancholic folk. These recordings became Dignan Porch’s first LP ‘Tendrils’ released by Brooklyn-based independent label Captured Tracks in 2010.
*The Agit Reader
“‘Tendrils’ is bursting with coolness and melodies to kill or die for.” — Rough Trade
By end of 2010 the live band was in full swing, touring with Times New Viking, playing the independent festival circuit and many one-off gigs with the likes of Lovvers, Yuck, The Intelligence, Smith Westerns and Ty Segall.
Live reviews
“London five-piece, centered around the two Walsh brothers Joe and Sam, play a variant of fuzz-infused lo-fi punk that gives many of their contemporaries a serious run for the money, hence the reason why Captured Tracks got the band signed up before anyone else.” — Drowned in Sound
“Dignan Porch’s psychedelic garage rock travels back to the 1980s and beyond. Touching on the hollow crunch of The Wake, they make an absorbing racket. The songs race from short garage blasts to keyboard-led zombie ballads that wade through a cosmic marsh of guitars and vocals.” — The Fly
For their 2011 12” EP ‘Deluded’, Dignan Porch stepped into a studio with the full band, plus Henry Withers from Lovvers working the desk. Four tracks recorded in the studio and a further four tracks home-recorded by Joe, having now honed his skills somewhat. ‘Deluded’ was released again by Captured Tracks.
“Dignan Porch just make it sound effortless. Well, it is effortless for them. It’s real. It’s a pure crystallised idea, boiled down to something very simple. With this kind of slackness percolating through every skewed vision, Joe Walsh and the gang manage to capture a truly thrilling ride without letting up on the honesty.” —The Line of Best Fit
For their recently completed LP, expected to hit the shelves on 24 July 2012, Dignan Porch have recorded live on to reel-to-reel tape with minimal overdubs, taking another step towards honing their sound while maintaining their DIY ethic.
“Equal parts psych-pop and pastoral folk, Tendrils is a record that does a whole lot with only a little, as Dignan Porch craft a hazy aesthetic without ever leaning too heavily on the hallmarks of lo-fi. Each song is its own tight, unique composition, and the vocals move from striking gang-shouts to banshee wailing to isolated keening without ever losing the thread.” — Pop Matters
“It’s a surprise to me that they haven’t managed to catch more people’s ears playing this kind of slack-jawed, noise rock, similar in vein to Times New Viking. It’s especially surprising as their songs are often much better than the aforementioned band. Perhaps it’s the attitude they evoke that falls on deaf ears, sometimes it’s so laid back as to be almost non-existent. Certainly the production is affected in this way. Yet to me it finds a long ancestry in British psychedelia, similar to Syd Barrett’s dryness or that special raw quality in Television Personalities. Often the best moments are when the noise and the clutter fade away and you are left with this uncertain haze, perhaps just the beat and a fuzzed out guitar, that seems to refract all this massive sadness hidden underneath the skin of everything and expose it to the brilliant daylight.” — The Line Of Best Fit
