The tousled troubadour is back as Fionn returns in a lazy haze
FIONN REGAN: Cala (Abbey) Verdict: Songs for summer ★★★★✩
PETE YORN: Caretakers (Shelly Music) Verdict: Tuneful guitar pop ★★★✩✩
Fionn REGAn missed a trick when he failed to make the most of the success of his 2006 debut album The End of History. nominated for a Mercury Prize, the acoustic tour de force placed the touslehaired irishman firmly in the tradition of music’s great storytellers.
But he refused to conform to type. He alienated fans by experimenting musically and beefing up his simple sound. He then disappeared for five years, clearing the way for Ed Sheeran and George Ezra to cash in on the acoustic boom.
He was even upstaged by another singersongwriter, Hozier, from his hometown of Bray, near Dublin.
His talent remains intact, however, and his sixth album Cala — named after the Spanish word for cove — is just the record to put his once promising career back on track. Played entirely by Regan, 37, on acoustic guitar, piano and subdued synths, its lazy, hazy moods are perfect for what’s left of the British summer.
The second release since his selfimposed five-year exile, Cala harks back to the crispness of his debut.
That record’s sensitive introspection struck a particular chord with female fans, including Andrea Corr, Ellie Goulding and Lucinda Williams (who compared him to Bob Dylan), and a return to dreamy reflection finds him back to his best.
Like his debut, Cala was written in Bray — and a proximity to Dublin’s coastal outskirts is clear in a suite of love songs and heartbreak ballads
that breeze by in a balmy blur of sand dunes, starry nights, August moons and, on the piano-led title track, ‘twenty miles of amber’.
if that sounds just a little too cloying, Regan cleverly avoids any schmaltzy sentimentality.
THE intricate melodies of Collar of Fur and Head Swim are picked out studiously on acoustic guitar, but delivered with a lightness of touch that echoes the Seventies California songs of Crosby, Stills & nash and Joni Mitchell.
Cala lacks variety. The only real mood changes arrive on the electronic Glaciers and mid-tempo Riverside Heights, but such consistency is also a strength. With ten songs clocking in at just 35 minutes, this is quality over quantity.
if Regan comes across as a oneman
Crosby Stills & nash, then Pete Yorn is more like a singlehanded version of The Strokes.
The new Jersey singer, 45, is best known for his soundtrack work — he scored the movie Me, Myself & irene — and duetting with Scarlett Johansson on 2009’s Break Up and last year’s Apart. But he also delivers superior indie-pop in his own right, too.
His first solo album in three years, Caretakers is refreshingly straightforward. Made with producer Jackson Phillips, of Californian rock band Day Wave, it mixes the spontaneous guitar jangle of i Wanna Be The one with more angular workouts, such as opal and Try, that tunefully channel interpol and new order.
BotH albums are out today. Fionn Regan plays at Earth, London, on october 7 (fionnregan.com).