Fontaines D.C. continue to pave their own singular path on third album Skinty Fia,just out. They're the most significant and interesting of this new wave of angry young Irish men and women that's been gathering and building these last few years and though a lot of these bands and artists sound not disimilar to FDC, none of them quite have their focus, scope or power.
I took to Skinty Fia on first listen, which slightly surprised me as sometimes Fontaines records take a while to get under my skin. Writing this blog on a daily basis means that I'm not able to revisit records I review much, so I haven't been back to their first two as much as I could have and as much as I might have since giving them my initial stamp of approval,
Still, there's evident evidence of growth and change which is all you can really ask of any young bans. This is particularly good to witness as the base of their actual sound has aways been a fairly basic one. Predicated on the most basic Punk sounds, they remind me of Stiff Little Fingers more than any of those bands and SLF never painted the most sophisticated canvas.
The FDC sound is pretty much the same now as when they first set off ,but they do different things with it, are more adept in terms of sonic build and deciding when and where to land their big punches. So what we have here is a fairly glum, (they're all rather glum due to the vocal delivery, which doesn't have enormous range), literate and highly politicised rock songs whose roots are always embedded somewhere between 1977 and 1981.
Given that pretty narrow basicmusical horizon, they're doing incredibly well to maintain such an interesting, continually rising trajectory. Skinty Fia strikes me as their third highly successful album out of three and that's no mean strike record.
No comments:
Post a Comment