Fontaines DC
Skinty Fia
★★★★★
There is an existential question at the heart of Fontaines DC’s third album. Having found success and moved to London, the band are asking themselves what it means to be Irish when you exist outside of Ireland.
Throughout Skinty Fia – an Irish phrase that translates as “the damnation of the deer”, named for the extinct Irish giant deer and used as a cypher for the band – they ask these questions without offering many answers.
The album glowers, vocalist Grian Chatten not so much singing as intoning. Fontaines have found a knack for entwining their difficult concepts and chin-stroking shoegazey guitars with straightforward melodies that burrow into the brain.
Take “Jackie Down the Line” – there’s not much going on melodically, but the restrained range of the vocal makes it a chant that is hard to forget. Truly, one for the karaoke list (it then slinks into “Bloomsday”, which layers a decisively strummed guitar and gentle electronic slides behind Chatten’s deep vocal, and I suspect would be harder to replicate in the booth.)
“Layered” is the word for Skinty Fia. Musically, they have put more texture in than the fantastically barren A Hero’s Death or their choppy debut Dogrel, but it is a lasagne of feelings, too. You can take these songs as questions about your own place in the world physically, geographically or metaphysically – Fontaines are in constant conversation with themselves about their own truths.
If that sounds heavy and obscure, the songs themselves are not. Nothing here is hard to get into, and nothing feels like it is trying to exclude anyone – even as they sing of tight-knit micro-communities (as on the grunge-indebted “Roman Holiday”, coloured with shades of Primal Scream).
Allusions to Ireland’s history and what it means for the country now are also frequent and cleverly worded. “Nice to know that you’re still caring well enough to raise your voice,” Chatten sings on “The Couple Across the Way”. “But if we must bring up the past, then please don’t speak to me of choice.”
It is always a worry that after two good albums, a band might screw it up with their third as they tire of what has come before. Fontaines seem just to get better.
Stream: Skinty Fia, I Love You, In ár gCroíthe go deo
Kathryn Joseph
For You Who Are the Wronged
★★★★
Whether or not you are familiar with Scottish musician Kathryn Joseph, I must urge you to check out this raw, intense document of the ripple effects of abuse – of having been betrayed by love and left to pick up the pieces of yourself. Rather than her usual piano, she plays a keyboard on the most atmospheric and otherworldly settings, her voice morphed into something like a whisper meeting a moan.
The music may sound gentle, but the lyrics are brutal, Joseph packing aeons of pain into a tight word count. She is vengeful in her quietness. On “Flesh and Blood”, she sings of quiet moments of familial pain: “And all their hate and all their harm you have turned it into armour but I am wrong when I tell you I am strong enough to watch them kill you.”
There are hints at survival – that you can make it through the wounds inflicted on you, that one day they will know what they did – all while the reverb of the keyboard echoes around her voice. This is a chilling, beautiful album.
Stream: the burning of us all, until the truth of you, for you who are the wronged
Bonnie Raitt
Just Like That
★★★
Carrie Bradshaw and co returned this year with And Just Like That… but Bonnie Raitt has forgone all the “LOL, isn’t technology hard now we are old?” and “I guess I’m a podcaster now” of the Sex and the City reboot on her similarly named Just Like That…. The title of her 21st album is a reference to the moments that change us – inspired, partly, by the way the world ground to a halt in March 2020.
Raitt’s pen remains as spiked as ever: “If you could dance at all, you’d dance alone” on the opening track “Made Up Mind” is one of the sickest burns in modern music – you can’t dance and nobody likes you. Ouch.
She has moved out of her comfort zone in places – in the understated funk’n’roll of “Waitin’ For You to Blow”, for example – though not as much as I suspect she thinks she has. But it is an astonishing thing to have a voice that can still grab you and twirl you around after six decades in the business.
Stream: Waitin’ For You to Blow, Made Up Mind, Livin’ For the Ones
