With an opening acoustic strum that sounds like the start of The Jam’s English Rose, Grian Chatten radiates a calm so far removed from the clatter of Fontaines DC that you initially wonder if it’s the same person who sings so gutturally of Dublin streets and London scenarios. That acoustic strum belongs to The Score, the beautiful opening track of Chatten’s debut solo album. “When I make my move to you, you will know,” he sings soothingly. “I will give you thrills and take your pain, I will lay you down, like a shadow, like a stain.”
The song rolls along a path previously walked upon by many other songwriters – Elliot Smith and PJ Harvey spring to mind – but, as with the remaining eight songs here, for every ping of excitement there is a sombre note, a balance that comes naturally to as good a lyricist as Chatten. He has never been one for saccharine missives or platitudes, but the stark nature of his solo songs highlights even further his worldview of separating the good from the bad.
Chatten has said the songs on Chaos for the Fly were influenced by walking along a rough stretch of beach close to his family home in Skerries, in north Co Dublin. The songs could have been, he said, recalibrated and brought into the Fontaines DC fold, but “I didn’t want to compromise with these songs in that way”.
The result of such creative integrity is a brief album – about 35 minutes long – that uncovers numerous sides of Chatten’s sometimes whimsical character. Fairlies veers from skiffle to Simon and Garfunkel at the drop of an eyelid (“kindness is a trick to turn you strange, till you’re twisted and you’re shining like a varicose vein”); Bob’s Casino is loungecore with a brass neck, a bit Arctic Monkeys, a bit Swing Out Sister; All of the People takes a powerfully direct view of life as a reasonably high-profile singer (“You think that you love me, but you don’t, you think that you know me, yeah, well, you just don’t ... Don’t let anyone tell you that they wanna be your friend”).
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The final three tracks are plain, simple, superb. Salt Throwers off a Truck is a folk busker’s delight, with sawing fiddles and weepy pedal steel guitar. I Am So Far is a spectral shiver (with covocals by Chatten’s partner Georgie Jesson, who also gracefully enhances a few other songs). Season for Pain is a slow-beat-of-a-heart tribute to what Chatten describes as the bitterness of lives not lived.
A curveball? Yes. Can you catch it? Easily.
