Artist: The Murder Capital
Album: Blindness
Reviewer: Chad Dryden
On The Murder Capital’s 2023 breakthrough Gigi’s Recovery, the Irish quartet came on like The Strokes if Julian and Co. weren’t C+ language arts students who spent less time with their noses in books than they did Bolivian marching powder. Gigi’s is the sort of cerebral, substance-over-style post-punk record that resonates with me here as an aging human in a full-tilt midlife crisis, and I willingly put myself in the hands of quarter-lifers wrestling with their own existential quandaries to show me the way through the bog. Cue Gigi’s Recovery’s “Return My Head” and “I had to realign to begin to survive.” I know that feeling well.
Gigi’s Recovery is richly layered, dense and nuanced like blood-red wine, yet wholly approachable and palatable – the beat of the human-vampire heart of darkness with rare glimpses of light, something not always found within the self-flagellating murk of a post-punk record. Which explains why it reached a wider audience than the band’s previous album, 2019’s When I Have Fears, a solid (and critically acclaimed) debut that for all its high marks too often recalled contemporaries like Idles and too heavily relied on genre tropes past and present.
Gigi’s announced a young group coming into it own with a seismic leap not unlike that seen between Pablo Honey and The Bends: an enthralling modern guitar-rock band forging a singular identity, exuding ambition minus the opportunism, all the while making it all sound effortless – which spiritually if not sonically, to continue the through line, recalls Radiohead on approach to the new millennium.
As artistically and commercially successful as Gigi’s Recovery was, Blindness bursts out of the gate announcing a band eschewing victory laps and formulas. Awash in distortion and aggression, “Moonshot” makes Gigi Recovery’s somber opening track “Existence” sound like a lullaby by comparison. Much like Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground and pre-Kid A Radiohead employed electric guitars to artfully (and noisily) convey the emotional dissonance of the human experience, the dynamics on Blindness, in contrast to Gigi’s Recovery, rely less on lush undertones and airy sublimity and more on piercing squalls and feedback swirls.
Vocally, singer James McGovern splits the difference between his bark-and-bite attack on When I Have Fears and his gloomy lounge crooning on Gigi’s Recovery, often rasping his way through lyrics that suggest his attempts to see the world through rose-colored glasses were quickly shattered by the disillusions of that very same world. On “The Fall,” perhaps the song of the album – the CliffsNotes version of The Murder Capital’s intent here – McGovern hoarsely intones “the fall is coming” over and over again. It could be a personal omen or, early on here in a strange and disturbing 2025, a widescreen one for us all to heed.