Fontaines DC seem to be racing through their career like a timelapse nature documentary. The Dublin rock band have gone from brash punk debut to sophisticated experimental third album in just three years, ascending from playing clubs to major London venues the Eventim Apollo and Alexandra Palace in the same short spell, and winning a Brit Award too.
Now we’re already at the point where the singer goes solo, thankfully leapfrogging the stage where drug-fuelled egos make everybody hate each other. It sounds like Grian Chatten is actually being a thoughtful bandmate by keeping these nine songs for himself. “The rest of the band are all creative and songwriters in their own right, too. I didn’t want to go to them and be like, ‘No, every single thing has to be like this,’” he has said.
For this is very much his vision, one so complete that he claims that the whole thing came to him on a night walk on a beach north of Dublin. He recorded it in just two weeks with Fontaines DC’s regular producer Dan Carey. The pace of creation and the lack of pressure to make songs that will rouse large crowds means that Chaos for the Fly sounds very different from past work. The closest relative is The Couple Across the Way, from last year’s Fontaines DC album Skinty Fia, which consisted simply of Chatten’s voice and a wheezing accordion.
That means that if you aren’t already a fan of his rounded vowels, his voice is more exposed here with no powerful electric guitars to cloak it, but his poet’s heart is more evident too. His sometimes strident tones soften on I Am So Far, and it sounds like he’s going for something like the gravelly gravitas of Leonard Cohen on The Score.
All of the People is especially bleak, with funereal piano chords sitting back from his voice while he sings: “People are scum… They just wanna get close enough to take the final shot.” But the occasional appearance of his fiancée Georgie Jesson on backing vocals brightens things, especially on the swinging Bob’s Casino.
There’s a restless folk energy to Salt Throwers Off a Truck and an electronic prettiness to East Coast Bed. It sounds like Chatten is trying on a range of interesting new outfits. This collection won’t launch him to new heights as a solo artist, but it should help his band to be even more versatile when he returns.
