I can barely remember when I first heard it. I suppose it started as a low rumble - a deliberately hazy music video shared on my timeline, or the odd article cropping up in the hype column of some publication. But it was the word of mouth that truly struck me, a shadowy recommendation in the wee hours at my local, never about the same band but always with the same message. “There’s this band down south you NEED to hear.” It was the ‘NEED’ that drove it home, and indeed drove much of what was to follow. An almost primal miasma that spread up from Dublin, across the waters and eventually on to an international stage: Guitar bands are back, and they’re menacing. And people NEEDED to hear them.
One can’t help think that it was the perfect time for acts such as these. After all, adversity often inspires the best art and it’s not as if we are running low on catastrophe. And catastrophe NEEDS a voice to legitimise itself in an effort to prevent implosion. It’s the reason the tenacious romanticism of ‘Dogrel’ resonated as it did. It personified the battle between people and progression. Counterculture NEEDED ‘Dogrel’ as much as the opposite.
And while it seems trite to spend as much time on the boys in the better land as this, it seems equally necessary. Following their appearance on Fallon, the shadow Fontaines D.C. cast over the independent music scene in Ireland was turned into a spotlight. Their smokey bar backrooms became swarmed with journo’s looking for the next group of angry young men with teeth like a second-hand Casio keyboard. It seemed to be over almost as soon as it started, all of a sudden it was all too real (for ya). However, even the brightest lights create shadows, and in the gloom, The Murder Capital have managed to stake out a unique identity. With an inaugural album forged in a pit of brutalism and mystery, the five-piece are ferocious on debut ‘When I Have Fears.’ Ireland is angry. And The Murder Capital NEED you to hear her.
Following a two-year-long campaign that thrived on a ‘less is more’ aesthetic, The Murder Cap have managed to retain an idiosyncratic sense of self that perfectly matches their take-no-quarters sound. And while it seems impossible to talk about any band in Dublin now without Fontaines springing to mind, The Murder Cap seem the ideal anti-hero to the bustling charm of their contemporaries - if ‘Dogrel’ is cobbled streets and packed bars then ‘When I Have Fears’ is perched precariously on the edge of a tower block roof; cold, impossibly alone, with a sinister intent and a tremendous potential for danger.
Raised on a diet of Beckett (‘Don’t Cling To Life’ rings of absurdism) and brutalist architecture, the noise of ‘When…’ veers between wildly animated and frigid isolation. And what is striking is, again, a pathological NEED to be heard. Each song has a varying level of desperation, either panicked or aggressive, that demands an equally pertinent level of attention. Its what allows the significant contrast between opening track ‘For Everything’ (a malicious noise rock epic fulled by political poetry and quiet-loud-quiet structure that keeps tension high) and the penultimate ‘How The Streets Adore Me Now’ (piano-driven gothic number with a herculean emotional weight) to thrive as it does. The Murder Cap NEED you to hear the turmoil, symbolic or otherwise, that they seek to give voice to. If you don’t listen, you can’t understand, and if you don’t understand then you don’t stand a chance.
For all their urgency and planned chaos, however, ‘When…’ is contained by motivation and purpose. The restraint shown in the tight signatures of songs ‘For Everything’ and ‘Green & Blue’ is in keeping with the group's ethos of ‘trimming the fat’ - no line, chord or fill is wasted, everything has a part to play in the climactic growth of the album. Indeed, when laid out to bare ‘When…’ reads more like blueprints than an album. Its sonic architecture plots out and disassembles subjects such as suicide rates (‘On Twisted Ground’), gentrification (‘More Is Less’) and mental health (‘The Feeling Fades’) with surgical precision.
An abrasive structure is designed to inspire drama and foster unease. With the only tangible connection between songs being a venomous bass line (which rumbles, largely unseen but felt, omnipresently in the background. Like trains at nighttime, invisible but thunderously large), listeners are largely left to fend for themselves, bracing against a tide of sheer raw emotion. Frontman and main lyricist James McGovern has already developed a knack for piercing lyrics that have the same impact whether whispered or screamed, with influences tracing back to absurdist literature, modernist engineering and post-punk trailblazers Joy Division. It’s intricate, sophisticated songwriting, given a feral energy that draws its energy from fear and uncertainty - I found myself on edge throughout, unable to predict which way the album would leap next, shifting as it did between a menacing lurch, morose crawl and electrifying exhilaration.
Undoubtedly, ‘When I Have Fears’ is at its best when faced head-on. You take what you can earn from this record, and every second feels worth it. Confrontational, adversarial but also starkly open and vulnerable, the debut effort from The Murder Capital delivers on a years-long hype machine that sees them emerge squarely as one of Ireland’s best and most arresting musical talents. The landscape of ‘When I Have Fears’ is a brutal one, but its foundations are rooted in survival, love and humanity. Its frenetic energy is a righteous one, powering the heartbeat of an album that seems so at odds with the world around it that in order to live, it must scrap and claw for every second. An essential listen that left me cathartically pained and hungry for more. You NEED to hear it.