HOW DO you follow an unheard classic? After more than a decade on the indie fringes, Herman Dune released their masterpiece, Giant, in 2007.

Few listened, and the band fell apart. Now rebuilt around original songwriter, singer and guitarist David-Ivar Herman Dune and frankly rather cool drummer Cosmic Néman, the sound was more able punk rock than whimsy.

While this new sound – previewed on their new album Strange Moosic – is more mainstream and well suited to drowning out conversation in bars and clubs, it doesn’t necessarily play the band’s strengths – embodied by Dune himself.

Looking not unlike an Old testament prophet in jeans and hat, Dune has a rare ability to communicate in song with a great turn of phrase. There is the sense that this is a group who are one tune on a soundtrack away from wider success. Yet it stubbornly refuses to happen for them.

The mark of a good band is the ability to reinvent material, or show it in a different light. Case in point: on record Ah Hear Strange Moosic is a slight affair, but with the vocal support from superb openers Sean Flynn and the Royal, We, it was transformed. Not all of the reinvention worked so well. I Wish That I Could See You Soon had some of its dreamy quality crushed out of it by Dune’s newfound guitar heroics. The set really shone on the acoustic numbers; A Blessing And A Curse was stark and haunting while On A Saturday showed how Dune can take a simple premise and make it so much more.