The Murder Capital: 'Gigi's Recovery'
Something is happening in Ireland. A mood has descended, colouring the creative decisions of the country’s young alternative musicians. A particular style characterised by gloominess, grey sonic landscapes, and anxiety, pervades. Experiments are being made wherever possible, with language, melody, form, and genre. Tradition is being once again rejected; the future’s where it’s at, wherever it is, and it’s young Ireland building the time machine with which we’ll get there. To name a few disparate outfits: Fontaine’s D.C, Gilla Band, and Gurriers epitomise this movement. The Murder Capital, whose long-awaited second album ‘Gigi’s Recovery’ is out this week, are another.
The Murder Capital’s first album, ‘When I Have Fears’, was written within nine months of the band forming, and released in 2019 to the sort of fanfare as often labelled a curse as a blessing. Receiving a full five stars from The Guardian, with The Irish Times posing the question on everybody’s lips, “Ireland’s Best New Band?”, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that music journalism just might, despite undeniably good intentions, have been setting the band up to fail. It’s like The Guardian – bless them – had never heard of the phrase, “difficult second album.” I mean, where is there to go from five stars?
The answer seems to be: someplace darker. Fans of The Murder Capital’s more energetic, pulse-raising songs might be slightly disappointed by the tone of the new album, which seeks to synthesise the events of the last four years (because a lot has happened since 2019) in a manner which could be characterised, to put it lightly, as pessimistic. The same sonic experimentation which made the first album a thrill to listen to is there. ‘Crying’, the album’s second track, samples a video tutorial on how to sing Opera to create a backdrop against which the lyrics, “in line to be pulled from recurring dreams / that night those eyes became two streams” – similarly fractured, frightening – work to construct a sort of musical psychogeography in which the same ideas are returned to over, and over, with no satisfying resolution but to get lost in the music. The song’s refrain “is this our end?”, isolated within the lyrical stew, could pertain to as small a thing as a relationship’s climax to the extinction of humanity. The listener’s interpretation is what counts: The Murder Capital are not explicit in those terms.
‘Return My Head’ is the song’s poppiest (using the loosest definition of pop possible) experiment within the album, perhaps influenced by the boom in guitarists and guitar bands in recent years, giving the track a more predictable, but enjoyable course. In contrast, ‘The Stars Will Leave Their Stage’ is a far more isolated-sounding, electronic, meditation on the phenomena of immediate success and second album struggles.
One thing which made the band’s initial success promising was The Murder Capital’s lyrics - people often seem to want to link Irish musicians to the country’s historic wordsmiths and poets. Whilst there were beautiful images, such as “you’ve lived through my weakness / it shines on you even when you don’t see it” in ‘Belonging’, they function as another form of instrumentation, building on the band’s sonic landscape with the same images you might see through a cracked mirror.
Overall, this album is an excellent contribution to the many art-punk experiments underway all throughout Europe; the urge to experiment which defines this current wave is present, and often well executed, even if it’s testing at times. ‘Gigi’s Recovery’ feels like new waters for the band – not a lizard turning into a human, as in those old evolutionary illustrations, but walking back into the water, to feed on algae and plankton.
