The Murder Capital – Blindness – Album Review
by Killian Laher

The Murder Capital are back with their third album, and for those who enjoyed their first two, there’s plenty of angst and post-punk guitar vibes on this album.  It starts with a two and a half minute not particularly pleasant blast of noise, Moonshot, before improving significantly with the slow, draggy (in a good way) pair of Words Lost Meaning and Can’t Pretend To Know, filled with grinding guitars and catchy melodies.

Much of the music and James McGovern’s vocals are overwrought on the likes of A Distant Life and The Fall.  Born Into The Fight is a case in point, it starts out muted, something of a breather after what went before but builds up into a great big noisy chorus and the effect is a little exhausting.  They are much better when they take it down a notch on the stripped-down Love of Country.  Here McGovern’s voice isn’t fighting with the other instruments and is allowed more space to inhabit the song.  Here, he sings with real passion over a banjo-like guitar as the song develops.  There’s not much variation on a fairly long track at six minutes but despite this, it works very well.  The almost hymnal closer Trailing A Wing is similarly stripped down and features lovely playing.

Later on the album, the songs benefit from being less overloaded with instrumentation.  Death of a Giant and That Feeling are propelled by excellent, insistent guitar lines, while Swallow has guitar lines played with subtlety and unusual scraping sounds running through it.

A promising but uneven album – can’t help feeling if the band chilled out a bit, they would fully escape their influences and produce something really groundbreaking.

Words Lost Meaning