The Irish singer/songwriter Michael Treanor recently released his debut record called the Focus EP. According to Treanor it has a lot of personal material in the five songs that are on the EP. He shared that the album was made to help to combat some of the pain he felt after suffering some losses in his personal life, including the loss of a lover and also the loss of a friend from suicide. These losses also lead to the loss of Treanor’s mind, but the real message and the healing power of the album is documenting this pain and trying to keep a focus on the road ahead and learning to deal with all the bullshit that happens to one in life and being able to move on despite how hard it is.

Treanor definitely sounds like he’s been through some shit on this record. His voice at times sounds like he just finished balling his eyes out or just woke up from a long sleep. The instrumentation can sometimes take this route but also can be a little bit clangy and obnoxious in that great lo-fi way that a band like Guided By Voices found so many ways to create and re-create so many songs from.

On the opening track, “Gonna Creep Up On You” Treanor displays a showmanship of post-rock weirdness through jangle pop and a bit of glitzy keyboard that sounds straight out of some twenty-four hour lounge in 1980s Las Vegas. It’s just weird enough and just silly enough to make it kinda great.

​There is this great haunting quality to Treanor’s vocals on “She Is Gone (Love Is Gone)” which sounds like he’s just lying on the floor drunk and just lamenting that “she’s gone away” and this vocal effect changes to a later and sleepier drunk sounding Treanor on the lo-fi acoustic twang filled experiment of sorts that is “(Didn't I) Treat You Well?.” There’s this lonely swagger about the way the song just kind of falls about itself that I really dug a lot, and also the haunting but visionary piece of lo-fi acoustic folk that is “You Can Jump In The River.”

The ironic thing here on Focus EP seems to be that its protagonist sounds so very out of focus all of the time. Yet in this way he renders songs that seem to come from someone who is trying by not trying. These are in no way wholly fleshed out songs, but neither are they experiments meant to sound like experiments. Focus EP is as simple as breathing; we all know we’re doing it but we rarely think about it.

Jamie Robash/Divide and Conquer



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