A stormy, passionate, viscerally powerful new album by the indie-rock Dublin band of James McGovern, Damien Tuit, Cathal Roper, Gabriel Paschal Blake, Diarmuid Brennan fired up by personal and political issues. Band members are is now variously living in different places - in Ireland, London and Berlin, so coming together with producer John Congleton in LA, there’s a far more direct approach than their last, far more complex, elongated LP Gigi’s Recovery, a focused feeling of urgency and the songs written in a shorter period. Opener Moonshot is straight in, no intro, an intense love song, guitars straining at an edgy leash, frontman Jimmy McGovern’s voice slightly hoarse with feeling. Words Lost Meaning is a dark, broody anthem, Can’t Pretend To Know a stormy, pacy surge, or Swallow’s simmering psychedelia. Love of A Country is an intense, stripped back number addressing Ireland’s possibly changing culture, examining the dangers of see-sawing patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia, a pitfall many nations now face. But perhaps the highlights of these album is the extraordinary The Fall, twisting and evolving into blistering, explosive sections, and Death Of A Giant clambering arpeggios the opening line (“Black horse in the centre of the street …. with black feathers on their head mark the permanence of death”) a vivid, visceral depiction of the funeral procession of Shane McGowan in Dublin last year. Boiling with melancholy, the band have reset with renewed power. Out on Human Season Records.
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