Following the global success of Fontaines DC’s third album ‘Skinty Fia’ just last year, and ahead of the band’s mammoth 30-date US tour this autumn supporting Arctic Monkeys, few could have anticipated the news of a solo record from the band’s talismanic frontman Grian Chatten – or for it quite to sound quite as fragile and exposed.
More Donovan than ‘Dogrel’, ‘The Score’ offers up a strikingly pared-back sound; all acoustic guitars, romantic string arrangements and wh...
Following the global success of Fontaines DC’s third album ‘Skinty Fia’ just last year, and ahead of the band’s mammoth 30-date US tour this autumn supporting Arctic Monkeys, few could have anticipated the news of a solo record from the band’s talismanic frontman Grian Chatten – or for it quite to sound quite as fragile and exposed.
More Donovan than ‘Dogrel’, ‘The Score’ offers up a strikingly pared-back sound; all acoustic guitars, romantic string arrangements and whimsical melodies. A far cry from the bedevilled yet empowered shaman of Fontaines fame, soothsaying in the heated crucible of rock‘n’roll rage, Grian Chatten the solo artist comes across like some Marty Robbins-type folk troubadour, cast adrift in the barren wastelands of bleak consciousness, chowing down on his hard luck stories.
Venting the exhaustions of heavy workloads and relentless touring schedules, album ‘Chaos For The Fly’ is, in one sense, a cathartic expulsion of all the darker aspects of fronting one of the fastest rising rock bands to emerge in the past five years. “There was an end-of-my-tether kind of feeling on the last American tour,” Grian confesses of the songs’ conceptions. “There were things in my personal life that were finally starting to really disintegrate as a result of not really having a consistent life anywhere, nurturing my relationships with my family or my friends. So there were a lot of dark moments of isolation with nothing but a guitar, and I think I became a bit obsessed with digging into that sense of despair to be honest, in a kind of self-indulgent way. And in order to contextualise the way that I was feeling, in lieu of probably a social life or friends or a therapist, I think the songwriting became really important.”
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