The Murder Capital turn to volatile pop on Blindness

With their latest album, Blindness, they continue to process and move beyond their sources, honing their own brand of volatile pop – hooky songs garbed in often raggedy, often riotous instrumentation, and delivered via James McGovern’s chameleonic voice.

“Words Lost Meaning” is a buoyant yet grungy, affable yet sneery, and slacker yet fatalistic earworm. Instrumentation pivots between drones and welters. McGovern addresses how the purely sexual can segue into the romantic, desire for intimacy conflicting with fear of obligation. His gravelly vocal conveys world-weariness, the offish rockstar cum sensitive introvert, while the song’s melody could easily translate to a bubblegum context.

“Can’t Pretend to Know” contrasts a volatile soundscape and McGovern’s self-deprecating lyrics (“I’m just a plastic figurine”) with a wildly catchy melody. “The Fall” spotlights guitar parts that transition from the noisily tsunamic to the austerely accentual. McGovern rides an unshakeable melody, offering a rebellious mantra (“can’t be held can’t be fed can’t be whipped”).

The country-inflected “A Distant Life” is an unlikely but refreshing veer that exposes the realities of seeking validation through artistic endeavours; i.e., reconciling the creative and the commercial. McGovern, bringing to mind Scott Avett circa “I and Love and You”, conveys a certain effervescence, all the while delivering a somewhat pessimistic message re “the price we pay for connection”. Some listeners may find the track incongruent with the rest of the album (and, perhaps, the band’s overall output), but it’s an important inclusion, highlighting The Murder Capital’s ability to recontextualize various genre signatures – expanding and redefining their MO.

The stripped-down “Love of Country” features what sounds like a flea-market guitar run through a blown-out amp. McGovern’s first take/best take vocal is unadorned, recalling a demo-y yet charged outtake that would make Fontaines, D.C. and The Arctic Monkeys cringe with envy (Shane MacGowan and Lou Reed giving a thumbs-up from the afterworld). If When I Have Fears and Gigi’s Recovery showed the band absorbing the postpunk and alt-rock manuals, including the weighty pensiveness of Joy Division and the melancholic vibe of The Smiths, Blindness illustrates them maximizing their creative synergy while borrowing unabashedly from diverse playbooks.

“Swallow” makes use of washed-out guitars, loping percussion, and a refrain that conjures a flute filtered through a chorus pedal. McGovern is both vulnerable and deflective, obliquely confessional and elusive, a student of Nick Cave’s bookish diarism as much as Bowie’s persona-driven forays. Undertones of longing, grief, and powerlessness dramatically converge. “That Feeling”, too – with its reverb-y/choppy/frenetic guitars and wistful vocal – has an otherworldly, almost dissociative vibe yet is also assertive, life-affirming: nihilism meets stoicism meets epicureanism.

Blindness succeeds for its craft-related enhancements, yes, but more so for the way in which it distinctly channels the band’s rawest impulses. The stuff of the collective id is inventively concretized, converted into audial gestalts that evoke sublime responses. The album captures the band at their most independent, revelling in high-energy performances while embracing a broad eclecticism.