★★★★☆
Among the many commendable aspects of Fontaines D.C.’s third studio album Skinty Fia, which we named the very best of last year, was its pacing. Torment and unease is found at almost every turn in the record, but the seventh track, ‘The Couple Across The Way,’ provides momentary respite as the band step aside for frontman Grian Chatten to sing starkly above an oozy accordion.
‘The Couple Across The Way’ would fit neatly on Chatten’s debut solo album, Chaos For The Fly – and not just for the obvious reason it’s essentially the singer left to his own devices. Wistful and blue, it demonstrates that whilst Chatten is the lead singer of a spirited post-punk group, he’s a deep thinker and romantic at heart, which is exactly where we find him on his first solitary LP.
The new album is also steeped in Irishness. That might sound like an obvious point, but where Skinty Fia saw Chatten and co. leave Dublin to take on the heady highs of London – providing the sense of dislocation on tracks like ‘Roman Holiday’ and ‘I Love You’ – Chaos For The Fly sees Chatten return to his roots, all mellow and downbeat.
Chatten has even described the album arriving into his conscious (“the whole fucking thing” in fact) following a walk along the promenade at Stoney Beach, some 30 miles from Dublin. But whether that’s an exaggerated anecdote or a true account of divine inspiration, he certainly embodies and embraces his Irishness here.
Plodding jazzy number ‘Bob’s Casino’ has a Jim White storytelling potency, picture-painting in Chatten’s drawn-out Irish lilt how “The big bossman’s eye / Fell on the pretty girl’s face”, and eventually “Drank away his sins / He never said goodbye”. The track’s strings and guest vocals, delivered by Chatten’s fiancée Georgie Jesson, provide a nostalgic feel – and this big band brightness is just one of the many different approaches taken across the project’s nine tracks.
Chaos For The Fly is an album of nine very distinct tunes. Some of them might hold a similar bleary-eyed melancholy – such as swaying ‘Last Time Every Time Forever’ and lullaby-like penultimate tune ‘I Am So Far’ – but there seems to be a concerted effort to try something different with each new offering.
The pummeling folk-rock of ‘Fairlies’, in which Chatten lets loose more than at any other point on the record by embracing solitude (“I can live alone Happy / Where I like to be / I can live alone, alone, alone, alone”), is entirely set apart from breathy opener ‘The Score’, which is perhaps the most forgettable track on the album.
Things are dialed-down especially on ‘All Of The People’. Delivered at the album’s midpoint, it’s Chaos For The Fly’s equivalent of ‘The Couple Across The Way’, both in its ability to slow things down – almost to a standstill in this instance – and in its gazing at life from afar, with Grian warning “Don’t let anyone tell you that they want to be your friend / They just want to get close enough to take the final shot.”
The piano-backed beauty of ‘All Of The People’ is on par as an album highlight with subsequent tune ‘East Coast Bed’, which twangs into life like a track from Blur’s Think Tank. The song’s dreamy second half, where Chatten repeats the title over and over, borders on the hypnotic – until the following fidgety folk of ‘Salt Throwers off a Truck’ brings you right back in the room.
Yet whilst this many-sided approach could be a flaw, in fact it’s the album’s most enjoyable quality. And besides, a project with long-standing Fontaines D.C. producer and Speedy Wunderground aficionado Dan Carey at the helm would never lack coherence.
The greater thread tying the album together, though, is Chatten’s poetry. The Fontaines frontman has expressed his motives for a solo album – which is slightly at-odds with the band’s current form – as being simply because he “didn’t want to compromise with these songs”; or, as he added, “I’ve got a couple of exaggerated aspects of my soul that I wanted to express.” Turns out, his soul has an awful lot to express, a great groundswell of heartache and contemplation.
Photo: Eimear Lynch
Brooding album closer ‘Season For Pain’ typifies this, as Chatten mournfully warns, “If you have nowhere to go / Get used to the rain / I doubt you’ll find what you’re looking for / I doubt the feeling remains.” Words hold a certain power, but the track’s jangly end will leave some wanting Fontaines D.C.’s distinctive fuzzy guitars and bass to kick in.
The fact is, after the brilliance of Skinty Fia, we can all hope for the next Fontaines D.C. record. But in the meantime, the band’s heartfelt frontman has delivered more than a mere stopgap. The pensive poetry of Grian Chatten leaves us a lot to ponder on.
