Tip a pint to Irish rockers

It's the stuff that hangovers are made of, an album posited upon the kind of go-for-broke boozing normally reserved for weddings and funerals, love and death. And O'Douling tells the story of its creation the best way that he knows how: over a beer. Or two.

"My father has a house right on the coast. We stayed there for three weeks, and there's several pubs next door," the frontman for Vegas-based Irish rockers The Wildcelts says with pint in hand, speaking of his native Ireland at Firefly on a recent Tuesday afternoon. "We basically spent the whole three weeks (expletive) up, doing this recording. We'd meet all these tourists in the pub, invite them back to the house at like three o'clock in the morning and that's what you're hearing on this recording."

It's called "Songs From The Drunk Tank," and it sounds like a really great Saturday night followed by a really harrowing Sunday morning. A visceral, whiskey-soaked mix of traditional Irish drinking songs and a pair of originals, the album sees this bunch adding some serious torque and 'tude to standards like "Rock Road to Dublin" and "Sailor Song," the latter of which sounds like it was fired from a cannon.

"If you go to Limewire and request one of these songs, people have taken them and made them real soppy and boring," says O'Douling -- and yes, it's just O'Douling, like a pastier Prince. "These are powerful songs."

The Wildcelts convey that power via short, sharp singalongs as fat free as the Ramones catalog, but buffered with traditionalism, like touches of wistful fiddle and mandolin. "Drunk Tank" marks the culmination of a nine-year Vegas residency for this bunch, who landed here with empty pockets and no place to stay.

"We arrived in Vegas on a holiday visa, no money, nothing," says O'Douling, clad in a plaid fedora and a black V-neck T-shirt. "We were so broke we were squatting at the Jockey Club, right next to the Bellagio. I had a friend who said, 'You guys can rehearse there.' And we said, 'Screw this, we're actually going to live here.' So we bought some sleeping bags from Wal-Mart and cooked frank and beans for six months."

Shortly thereafter, the band landed a regular gig at J.C. Wooloughan's at the Rampart, which eventually translated into a heavy schedule of casino gigs at places like Brendan's at The Orleans. Along the way, they've sold some 30,000 records on their own.

"The whole thing has been done on word of mouth," says drummer Tim Jones, an Australian native, noting how the band has established their own grass-roots distribution network via tourists who spread their CDs across the country. "They all want to take a story home with them."

And this lot has many tales to spin, most of them colored by hard luck and soft hearts.

"There's no glamour in this," O'Douling says, his voice tinged with pride, not resignation. "It's just real, raw music."

Jason Bracelin's "Sounding Off" column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at 702-383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com.