Fontaines DC Skinty Fia
Skinty Fia, Fontaines DC’s third album in as many years, after Dogrel and A Hero’s Death, is testament to their work ethic. The title, the band say, is an appropriation of a Gaeilge phrase meaning ‘the damnation of the deer’, equating to not treasuring something important.
Now based in London, the album often reflects the band’s recent experiences there. Opening with
In Ár gCroíthe Go Deo where singer Grian Chatten declaims over choral backing vocals, pulsing loops and Tom Coll’s snapped drums about a dispute concerning a Gaeilge inscription on a gravestone in an English graveyard and the Church of England’s fears it could be construed as ‘political’.
Roman Holiday speaks to Cumbriaborn Chatten’s encounters with British people who belittle the Irish as shamefully as any previous generation. Other tracks reflect their home thoughts from abroad. I Love You rails at an Ireland dominated by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Bloomsday is about saying farewell to the streets on which Joyce,
Behan and Kavanagh walked while guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell scrape away at their guitars. They make similar choices for Big Shot with lyrics written by O’Connell about feeling conflicted
Partisan Records, Out Friday April 22 ★★★★★
by fame. Jackie Down The Line is all do doo doos and la la las with Smithsish guitars and a Jackeen with whom you don’t want to foxtrot. More likeable, musically at least, is The Couple Across The Way, with an accordion drone reminiscent of Scottish avant garde musician
Ivor Cutler on his harmonium. It is a lovely musical curio about lessthan-good neighbours. The title track’s danceable groove might subtly signpost another direction next time out. The closer Nabokov, all hazy guitars and harmonies, is like falling very slowly and pleasantly under sedation.
Dogrel had a directness and a beltand-braces musicality but was a wonderful album.
A Hero’s Death was admirable in that they broadened their musical palette. Skinty Fia is so often lyrically oblique and musically maudlin that it is difficult to warm to. Perhaps Fontaines DC care little but their gallop to inarguable greatness slows with it; less haste more speed.