FILTER ALBUMS
Distance Learning
Dublin quintet explore heart and home on third album.
By Victoria Segal.
Here comes the big chill: Fontaines D.C. acting out their shadowplay.
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.
Conor ‘Deego’ Deegan speaks to Victoria Segal.
What was the mood like when you reunited to make Skinty Fia?
“It was good for us to have space from each other, really being able to live our own lives and be our own people. We came back together with loads of different influences for the songs. So, for Jackie Down The Line, I’d been experimenting with all these different kind of pedals, I’d been trying to work out sounds like Nine Inch Nails. I think that was the kind of thing you could only come up with if you had a load of time on your hands. There’s a lot to be taken from Nine Inch Nails in terms of arrangements and instrumentation. That kind of fragile approach to beauty, even among the earlier brash stuff.”
That “fragile approach to beauty” is apparent on opening track In ár gCroíthe Go Deo (“In Our Hearts Forever”).
“It’s a very strange song to play. We were actually laughing when we were writing it. It was me and [guitarist Conor] Curley singing this minor harmony like choirboys, singing in Irish. When the drums come in there’s that moment of hope and uplift. It’s about a woman who wasn’t allowed to put “In ár gCroíthe Go Deo” on her gravestone in England because the town council saw it as a political thing to put the Irish language on a gravestone.”
How did the accordion-based The Couple Across The Way take shape?
“We had this ambition of making a double album. One half was going to be the record it is now, the other half was going to be Irish traditional music, or new songs we’d written in the style of Irish traditional music. We’ve all written songs like that over the years, we’ve got a lot of them. The Couple Across The Way was one of those. The story behind the song itself is that Grian opened one of his windows and could hear his older neighbours arguing a lot. He was living with his fiancée, and he was wondering about the difference between old love and young love, hopes and fears. We’d all read Stoner [the 1965 novel by John Williams] as well. We all got really obsessed with that book last year, so I think he was thinking about that when he wrote it as well. I think it has a similar tone, a similar conciseness to the tragedy of it, you know?”
Is Skinty Fia the final part of a trilogy?
“I always dreamed as a teenager of making three great albums, like Nirvana had. That was my ambition – so now that we’ve done that, I don’t really mind what we do.”