Murder Capital - New peripheral visions

While belonging to the new post-punk movement that emerged starting from the second half of the 2010s, the Murder Capital represent the genre's most romantic, dark and tormented wing, one that favors poetic reflections on death and brotherhood, fear and healing over verbose political attacks

by Michele Corrado, Maria Teresa Soldani

Formed as The Murder Capital in 2018, James McGovern (vocals), Damien Tuit (guitar), Cathal Roper (guitar), Gabriel Pascal Blake (bass) and Diarmuid Brennan (drums) each come from a different part of Ireland, but met in that fertile Dublin scene which in recent years has given birth to numerous alternative rock bands, from Pillow Queens to Gilla Band and, of course, Fontaines D.C..

Certainly part of that new post-punk movement that emerged starting from the second half of the 2010s of the new millennium (Idles, Shame, and at least in part the aforementioned Fontaines D.C.), the Murder Capital nonetheless represent its most romantic, dark and tormented wing, one that favors poetic reflections on death and brotherhood, fear and healing over verbose political attacks.

"The new Fontaines D.C." was the phrase bandied about everywhere when the Murder Capital made their first appearance on the alternative rock scene in 2019. As if the Fontaines D.C. themselves weren't still "new", as if they too hadn't released their debut full length that very same year. As if the latter hadn't themselves been dubbed Ireland's answer to Idles. It was, in short, a brutally reductive piece of critical shorthand, one that not only proved misleading in introducing an interesting new band, but at the same time diminished the depth of a genuine scene - one that has grown ever more crowded and significant - straddling the turn of the last two decades of post-punk.

The two names mentioned do, however, still come in handy for laying down some coordinates to place When I Have Fears, the debut LP from young James McGovern's band. The Dublin accent certainly recalls that of Grian from Fontaines D.C., while the less melodic and varied guitar style of the other Dubliners - drier and more aggressive - points back towards the Bristol band.

Aside from punk lashes with thunderous declamations worthy of a new Joe Talbot, such as "More Is Less", "For Everything" and "Feeling Fades" - which have earned themselves a few spots on compilations dedicated to the scene - Murder Capital adapt the genre's belligerent canons to their own tastes, also adding conspicuous dark trimmings: a cavernous, tarantella-like bass à-la Peter Hook and decadent string appearances (the whale-song that opens the record, the slow fade-out of "Slowdance II").

This is an inevitable aesthetic signature, given the constant references to death hovering over every corner of the lyrics. From its very name, the Dubliners' work is marked by the suicide of a mutual friend (certainly on "Green & Blue", but less explicit references to the tragedy can be traced in almost every track), just as "Don't Cling To Life" was written following the untimely death of a member's mother, which occurred during the recording sessions. It's in this song that McGovern delivers the album's harshest and most existentialist verdict, "There's Nothing On The Other Side", before embracing hope again in the stormy closer titled "Love, Love, Love".

There are numerous reflective moments that Murder Capital allow themselves - unusually for the scene - filling the already leaden scenarios with further spleen. The aforementioned "Slowdance I" and "Slowdance II", which nonetheless flow into searing, melodramatic finales, but above all the decadent "On Twisted Ground" and "How The Streets Adore Me Now", a gloomy, foggy ballad murmured by a voice of smoke and velvet, wandering by the light of old Victorian lanterns.

It's certainly true that producer Flood's great craftsmanship (a man who has produced post-punk masterpieces across every era) had a fundamental impact on the sound of When I Have Fears, but the record still comes across as solid and personal, especially for a debut. Five angry, brooding Dubliners who, with their first album, proved just how well they can play - in moments of pain as much as in moments of war.

Almost four years pass before the second album sees the light of day. Murder Capital focus on searching for a new sound to make something work outside the usual comfort zone in which riffs used to fly about, thus creating a renewed alchemy and an unprecedented balance between the fabric of the music, the arrangements and the exuberant presence of their charismatic frontman. This is behaviour in keeping with a band clearly more reflective and shadowy than the average new post-punk act, which brings to mind several aspects of Editors's transitional phase between the debut "The Back Room" (Kitchenware, 2005) and "An End Has a Start" (Kitchenware, 2007).

Just as lyrical and taut between the words, the rhythm of the verse and the vertigo of each word's meaning, Murder Capital try to change direction, tempering the fervor and distortion of their debut towards electro-psychedelic atmospheres and oblique movements. From the very first singles, all released in late 2022, it was already clear not only that the sound was partly changing course, but also that there was a shift in mood. While When I Have Fears was steeped in darkness and ominous premonitions on the theme of death - which at the time had repeatedly intruded into the band's lives - Gigi's Recovery (2023) signals from its very title that this time, although shadows still remain, it's recovery and its light of renewal that take centre stage, bringing with it the overcoming of isolation.

Recovery, the new beginning par excellence, can only come through a stylistic renewal. The Fall's acidic sneers - the main common thread of the new post-punk scene, and still present on the band's debut - have vanished here. McGovern and co. are now devoted almost entirely to introspection, which is reflected in sonic textures that are more delicate than before, at times downright evanescent.

If two of the four singles that preceded the album - the hymn-like "Return My Head" and the sun-drenched, full-throated "Only Good Things" - recall the instantly catchy choruses of their fellow Dubliners Fontaines D.C., the same cannot be said of the rest of the record, built on less immediate and more refined compositions and developments, such as "The Stars Will Leave Their Stage".

The guitar work done by the duo of Damien Tuit and Cathal Roper is astonishing, lending incredible depth to the emotional spectrum conjured by McGovern's lyrics right from the opener "Existence". In "Crying" the guitars seem to creak, mournfully submerged in fog, dragging even the vocals to the edge of pitch, as in the dark ballad with electronic shadings "Belonging", while in more liberating tracks like "The Lies Become The Self" and "A Thousand Lives" they first collapse into a strangled lament and then flash like shards of glass under the blows of the solos. It's then the title track that brings our focus back to the great work done by the rhythm section, in the album's most steadfastly and lucidly anguished episode, representing one of the finest fruits of the band's compositional as well as emotional maturity.

It takes time to get into Gigi's Recovery; you have to get past a great many emotions, as well as all the uncertainties of a journey that lays itself bare in becoming sound and song, in anything but an imperative or assertive way, as on "We Had To Disappear", while still carving out an unexplored and personal path that also draws on 90s English rock, as on "The Lie Becomes The Self", a track suspended between Pink Floyd and Radiohead that would have been unimaginable on the previous album.

A step backwards - a huge one, in fact. But a well-considered and necessary one.

After the more sophisticated and delicate Gigi's Recovery (Human Season, 2023), on which Murder Capital recounted the process of healing through almost Radiohead-esque flourishes with clean, refined sounds, "Blindness" marks a decisive return to a dark, angry, political and visceral post-punk, with dirty, urgent sonics. In some moments, moreover, the noise and harshness go far beyond those of the aching "When I Have Fears" (Human Season, 2019) that first introduced us to them.

On Blindness the Dubliners place the guitars at the centre of everything, together, naturally, with James McGovern's voice, never before so brash and flamboyant. The sinew of the tracks is powerfully underpinned by the rhythm section, particularly the bass, which carries out significant work weaving together all the parts and driving the songs forward, as on "Can't Pretend to Know", "Love of the Country" and "That Feeling". The album's programmatic manifesto shouldn't, however, mislead you into thinking it's all taut, powerful tracks: there are in fact numerous introspective moments, where Murder Capital seek not so much to impose order on the world as to bring it back to a state of calm necessary for survival, as also suggested by "Trailing A Wing", the song that closes the tracklist.

But let's rewind the record and start from the beginning. The opening with "Moonshot" is a kick to the gut: Brennan's heavy, jagged drumming and the barking guitars of Tuit and Roper stir up a chaos that immediately reveals dark, battered textures, a blind and booming rage. Let's not beat around the bush: as enjoyable and bold as it was in terms of sonic reinvention, Murder Capital's second album hadn't quite managed to leave its mark in terms of songs - something that definitely cannot be said of Blindness.

After a bass intro that borrows both the swagger and weight of David J., it only takes seconds before the despondent "Word's Lost Meaning," with its dark passages, explodes into a hard-to-forget chorus. The same thing happens with "The Fall," though here the guitars slither like serpents on amphetamines, framed by almost grunge, radio-friendly openings.

Among the softer moments of the tracklist is the indie-rock vignette of "A Distant Life," almost a folk march, but charged with interference à la Spoon, in which McGovern drops a melancholy lyric about memories, and the ballad "Swallow," whose measured pace holds a sense of resignation: "I need you to go / So you don't swallow me whole". The spirit of Radiohead/The Smile returns in the musings of "Born Into the Fight" and in the geometries of "Death of a Giant," both of which, however, are fully worked out and resolved in Murder Capital's own way. The instrumental framework of "Love Of Country" is light, almost skeletal - a song about this world full of rage - but it soon blooms into a lush, almost baroque weave of guitars and bass, over which the frontman delivers one of the sharpest lines on the tracklist: "Could you blame me for mistakin' your love of country for hate of men? Oh". One of the most intense tracks on the album.

The fact that Blindess was released just two years after Gigi's Recovery shows us just how urgently these songs needed to come out, almost as if the long process behind the making of the second album had literally overflowed into the third, as though the band had to let loose an emotional world that had stayed under the surface. With this release, the Irish band confirms not only its own artistic maturity, but also that it has seriously committed to reshaping the current revival (of the revival) of post-punk in a singer-songwriter vein, thanks to songwriting - in its entirety, not just the lyrics - that is refined and never predictable.