Distance Learning
Dublin quintet explore heart and home on third album. By Victoria Segal.
Fontaines D.C. ★★★★ Skinty Fia PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP
“WHEN YOU speak/Speak sincere/And believe me friend, everyone will hear,” sang Grian Chatten on the wisdom-dispensing title track of Fontaines D.C.’s last album, 2020’s
A Hero’s Death. There is always the danger that “sincerity” can be used as cover for a multitude of on-the-nose, salt-of-the-earth sins, but with Skinty Fia (an old Irish exclamation meaning “the damnation of the deer”), it’s clear just how acute this band’s understanding of the balance between art and heart has become.
If A Hero’s Death was partly informed by the seismic upheaval caused by the saviours-ofguitar-music success of 2019 debut Dogrel, Skinty
Fia emerges from less frenetic circumstances, a deep appraising breath, a chance to burrow deep into love, identity, the shifts and pressures of building new lives away from Ireland. The youthful buoyancy of
Dogrel has ebbed away; there’s a chill deep into the bones of these big, bold songs.
From arrestingly ecclesiastical opener
In ár gCroíthe Go Deo (“In Our Hearts Forever”), a beautiful choral swell building under Chatten’s furious lyrics of loss and parting, a pall settles that rarely lifts.
Big Shot, with lyrics by guitarist Carlos O’Connell, feels like a sad mirror image of Dogrel’s defiant Big, the paths of escape not as easy as once hoped – “Found the moon too small/And home is a pin/Rusting through a map.” The notion of home is complicated throughout: Roman Holiday’s expansive guitar rushes mask a raw unease being at large in a strange-ish land; the hectic I Love You ranges across Irish politics and history, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, “Sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws”. Bloomsday, meanwhile, casts off the inclination to romanticise with a vicious Joy Division clang, refusing to hide behind the tourist-friendly, the elegantly curated.
If the political is complicated, the personal is no less fraught. Jackie Down The Line lands like a disturbing short story about septic masculinity, its punchy, grease-stained swagger evoking The Smiths of Barbarism Begins At
Home or How Soon Is Now?. The title track draws on a particular strain of early 2000s electronica, the not-raving-but-frowning gothic narratives of Death In Vegas, to unpick its paranoias and loss of self. Relationships, meanwhile, are viewed with an unstintingly forensic eye, from the needling repetitions of How Cold Love Is to The Couple Across The Way, a song backed by the accordion Chatten received for Christmas that uses a fractious old couple as a haunting cautionary tale for young lovers.
Such spectres lurk on every song, yet dour contemplation never greys out into pure ennui or indistinct rage. Skinty Fia – both phrase and record – might hint at a grim extinction event, but by staring down the prospect of built-in obsolescence, the loss of self, Fontaines D.C. sound full of new life.