Careerist album launch in Ulster Sports Club - live review

As Belfast trio Careerist release Silver Birch Lodge – their first album since Weird Hill six years ago - they play a launch gig in Belfast's Ulster Sport Club. Chris Mullan was there to review

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There was but one place to be this past Friday night in Belfast. Putting to one side the baffling reality of paying almost as much for a pint of Beavertown Gamma Ray as one would have for the night’s ticket - the Ulster Sports Club, in the heart of the city was, for better or worse, the venue of choice for the most anticipated indie gig of the year.

Belfast’s own band, cult-heroes Careerist (formerly Hot Cops, I wonder do we still have to mention this, like X used to be Twitter? I’m sure they’ll love that comparison) are back after six long years away; years that fell away almost in an instant when they took to the boards, to be met with a room packed full of fans, family, friends, peers, scenesters and anyone, really, who has had more than a passing interest in the music of this island over the past 15 years. A triumphant return for our prodigal sons of ‘good rock and/or roll’ indeed. But, and it is a big ‘but’… those pint prices?

Belfast’s Ulster Sports Club, has, in recent years become the city’s de facto venue for shows of this ilk. Local, national and even international acts will stop here on tour, playing to varying sizes of crowds. That the Careerist show was a sell-out comes as no surprise for those who followed the band through the 2010s as they, comparable only perhaps to And So I Watch You From Afar, fostered the same sort of undying, cult-like worship and genuine affection from Irish music lovers through their specific brand of tongue-in-cheek, idiosyncratic rock and roll. They were and are, still, unendingly cool.

Cool. Unlike the fact 100 Irish music venues, and counting, have closed since the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike the recent knock-back campaigners in Northern Ireland received from the Stormont Executive – who tore up a report that cost half a million quid to produce; recommending a raft of revolutionary licensing measures designed to take a city like Belfast kicking and screaming in to the 21st Century.

So, while this remains the foundation that our live, independent music scene is built upon, don’t expect an alternative to your £7.80 pint of Beavertown. In fact, learn to enjoy it - and shut up. Don’t shoot the messenger.

None of this takes away from what happened inside the club on this night. Middler - the latest Belfast band, like Chalk and Enola Gay before them, flying the flag for a vital and heavy industrial noise that is the new, genuine beating heart of the city’s underground - kicked off proceedings. And then Dublin-based Dose, taking second billing, where they lulled a captive audience into a false sense of security with traditional bass, guitar and drum elements only to subvert with theatrical turns of primal release through spoken-word interludes undermining the capitalist structures that produce, say Fig Rolls. That they played to a packed house as the support is a testament to the raw power of the performance. Utterly illuminating.

And then, six years gone in an instant. Careerist work the stage like no time has passed since I last saw them in this exact space in 2019, in support of their debut Weird Hill. Knowing, perhaps, full well the mountain of goodwill for their band in the room tonight, they rollick through old favourites from their days as Hot Cops, and songs from both the debut and their latest release: the magnificently Ulster-coded Silver Birch Lodge, an album of 70s British glam influenced numbers that belies, to a degree, the overarching feeling that this album is an ache. An album that appears to be about life but must be about love, was about love. And what comes next.

It is a potent feeling, that of what comes next. This show feels like a rebirth in this sense. A collective gathering of us who, when Careerist first arrived were still in the ascendence of adolescence, the innocence of ignorance; who might look around now at what was lost and what was gained, not least in the six years since this band has been silent. But as songs like Sicko, Negative One and No Fun bounce off the walls with posters of past gigs from Black Midi to Fat White Family, echoes of what may have been for Careerist quickly die out as the congregation joins in a moment of supreme catharsis as the extended encore takes us well into the night. Into what comes next.

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