The Dublin indie band’s third album comes, alongside the powerful, gritty songwriting, with an expanded sonic identity – guitars atmospherically expressing the darker and unnerving, with some shades of the Cure. That sound particularly comes across on standout track Jackie Down The Line, a song with menace that comes from the perspective of an abuser; I Love You, in which singer Grian Chatten’s lyrics build with a series of images that related to Ireland itself; Roman Holiday with echoes of The Smiths; the clattering, stormy guitars and drums of closing song Nabokov; and the title track, relating, with its own quietly thunderous sound a title that translates as ‘the damnation of the deer’, relating to an archaic language of an Irish curse, and with Irishness, and leaving Ireland, a central theme encapsulated in that vulnerable, now extinct native animal on the front cover. Overall this a more reflective, more shoegaze-y album than the previous postpunk two, with occasional leaning towards more folk and traditional musical directions, particularly with the harmonica and voice only track about the bewildered feelings expressed about social change from the perspective on elderly pair in The Couple Across The Way, or. the delicate vocal harmonies of opener In ár gCroíthe Go Deo. Unpredictable, restless, wary, powerful, and once again given Dan Carey’s trademark production quality. Out on Partisan Records.
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