The Murder Capital have made no bones about the fact that they view their last album, ‘Gigi’s Recovery’, as overwritten. It suffered, they’ve said recently, from a protracted nine-month-long writing process stewing in a Wexford country house, then three more in London, where, in their words, “inertia let itself in the back door.” Their latest album, ‘Blindness’, is an intentional push in the other direction.
The Dublin five-piece, with members now scattered across multiple cities, reconvened in the Irish capital for an intensive writing session – 12 songs in 10 days. Then, they recorded in a swift three-week blast in Los Angeles with John Congleton, who encouraged them not to even bother with demos beyond phone recordings.
Opener ‘Moonshot’ shows the benefit of that approach. There’s no build-up here – the record begins at maximum intensity, a full throttle barrage of chainsaw guitars and hyperspeed drums. Recorded in the last two hours of their studio time, you can feel the determination Jimmy McGovern’s voice, his singing’s hoarse and frayed at the edges, a final rush of energy.
It catapults them into ‘Words Lost Meaning’, where the energy plunges into a delicious gloom, deep guitars smoking around a slinky bassline – a little inflection of eerie keys providing captivating countermelody. Then, they pick the tempo back up for lead single ‘Can’t Pretend To Know’, razor sharp guitars firing and rebounding in all directions. The momentum’s relentless on the opening salvos of ‘Blindness’; so too on the anthemic rush of ‘The Fall’, which comes later.
The problem, however, is that immediacy can be a double-edged sword – there are points on ‘Blindness’ calling out for more work. Coming directly after those thrilling opening three tracks, the veer of ‘A Distant Life’ into bouncy indie rock is enjoyable enough, but also deflates the momentum. ‘Born Into The Fight’ is a track in two parts, veering between ruminative verses to aggressive choruses, but ends up slipping into an awkward middle ground. ‘Death Of A Giant’, written as a tribute to Shane MacGowan, paints an evocative picture of the funeral procession they witnessed during their writing sessions, but then goes no deeper.
Ultimately, however, it’s all testament to a relentless experimentalism across the record, and more often than not their experiments work. ‘Swallow’ offers gorgeous little inflections of psychedelic glimmer. ‘Love Of Country’, recorded in a single live take, is a sprawling meditation on the push and pull between patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia, and shows McGovern’s songwriting at its most incisive. If The Murder Capital’s aim was to purge themselves of inertia, then ‘Blindness’ can only be judged as a success.
