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REVIEW Fontaines D.C.

PAGE 55 // GO LISTEN

A selection of must-listen new albums, including offerings from Fontaines D.C., Róisín O and The Waterboys. PAGE 56 // GO WATCH

The best new TV and streaming shows, including The Time Traveller’s Wife and We Own This City. PAGE 57 // GO READ

New books from Patrick McCabe and Don Winslow lead the way on our recommended reading list.

BEST IN SHOW

THE SUMMER’S MUST-HAVE ALBUMS

FONTAINES D.C

SKINTY FIA Partisan Records

With the media octopus in propulsion, these days, dogs in the street offer opinions about all things Fontaines D.C. Indeed, you get the sense of both a hullabaloo and a tribunal being assembled to meet the release of Skinty Fia. The album opens with a Sinéad O’Connorstyle incantation, as Gaeilge, underpinned by the austere ingenuity of bassist Conor Deegan, creating a pacific calm in the squall. All five Fontaines now dwell in London – for centuries, an asylum from where many Irish scribes have pondered the old sod. Skinty Fia, as Dogrel before it, applies the Yeatsian seduction of making Ireland once more interesting to the Irish. It’s done not by donning the Paddy mask – rather, the band attempt to comprehend the complex identity of the Irish emigrant.

On the phenomenal ‘I Love You’, Grian Chatten emblematises Ireland as a beautiful being, lamenting the unworthiness of her ruler, firing polemics at the old sow, castigating Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the Cain and Abel offspring of Collins and de Valera.

Tom Coll’s hip-hop inflected drumbeats, first unleashed on ‘You Said’ from A Hero’s Death, here reign supreme, much of the record rolling on his swing. ‘Nabokov’ contains flashes of the ’60s garage sound the band once possessed, recalling The La’s, but is now doused in a Death In Vegas-style wash. Mighty stuff. WILL RUSSELL In 2012, Róisín O introduced herself as an artist firmly in touch with her family’s folk roots, as well as the more international outlook of the likes of Joni Mitchell, with the release of her debut album, The Secret Life Of Blue. Now, after a decade of moving in an increasingly pop-oriented direction – most notably as one half of Thanks Brother – she’s making her defiant return as a solo artist, with her second album, Courageous.

The project features co-writes with Gavin James and her brother, The Coronas’ Danny O’Reilly. There’s other major hitmakers behind-the-scenes too, such as Philip Magee, Ruadhri Cushnan, and Cian MacSweeney.

But the voice at the heart of the album is the real draw. ‘Heart + Bones’ is the indisputable highlight, packed with authentic emotion and space for her vocals to soar, while ‘Stolen’ embraces a similar dramatic flair as Lyra. Róisín wears her influences on her sleeve – embracing an obvious penchant for the power of the pop ballad. Elsewhere, she moves a little closer to the earnest pop-punk that’s been making a resurgence in the international charts. There’s no denying the raw emotion and talent that drives Courageous. LUCY O’TOOLE

RÓISÍN O

COURAGEOUS Self-Released

THE WATERBOYS

ALL SOULS HILL Cooking Vinyl

Following 2020’s Good Luck, Seeker, Mike Scott continues to boldly push at the boundaries of his musical vision on All Souls Hill, his 15th album with The Waterboys.

True to the title, there’s a colourfully devilish, Día de los Muertos-style air permeating much of the album. It’s particularly notable on the opening title-track, establishing an eerie but undeniably groove-centric footing from the get-go.

While this atmosphere largely persists, The Waterboys are quick to change up the sound – leaping between genres and ideas as if journeying through a fever dream, eventually leading to the hip-hop-flavoured ‘Here We Go Again’. ‘Hollywood Blues’ is a hypnotic highlight, and Scott’s storytelling remains captivatingly strange and stirring.

LUCY O’TOOLE

FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE

THE LATEST TV & STREAMING ESSENTIALS

THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE

Sky Atlantic, May 16 “Sorry I’m late dear, but I involuntarily time travelled back fifty years.” Adapted from Audrey Niffenegger’s titular 2003 best-seller, this sci-far romance features Game Of Thrones’ Gwen Dawson and Backstabbing For Beginners’ Theo James as a young couple whose marriage runs into some unexpected difficulties. If you can get past the preposterous premise, the HBO eight-parter turns out to be as gripping as it is tender. Just don’t try using that excuse yourself, guys.

THE ESSEX SERPENT

Apple + Having finally said goodbye to Homeland after eight riveting series, Claire Danes lines up alongside Tom Hiddlestone in this classy adaptation of the Sarah Perry source novel. The action centres around the recently widowed Cora Seaborne who, having moved from London to the Essex coast, becomes convinced that a mythical sea monster actually exists. All manner of family drama unravels as she attempts to prove it. PISTOL

Disney+, May 31 Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle turns his award-winning gaze on the Sex Pistols in this six-part bioseries, which manages to be tender, raw and cartoonish all at the same time. The young cast includes Game Of Thrones star Maisie Williams who’s unrecognisable as beehive-haired punk provocateur Jordan. Also keep your eyes peeled for Jude Law and Sienna Miller’s daughter Iris Law who impresses as Jordan’s Bromley Contingent pal Soo Catwoman. THE NEWSREADER

BBC Two, Date Tbc Fresh from scoring a record number of Australian Academy nominations, this ‘80s TV news drama gets a well-deserved northern hemisphere airing. Mindhunter star Anna Torv plays primetime anchor Helen Norville who’s deemed ‘difficult’ for standing up to her misogynistic male colleagues. Things take a turn for the better with the arrival of Dale, a young reporter with serious smarts but none of the chauvinist attitude. Based on real events like the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl, it also features Stephen Peacocke who deserves a gong for Best Hugh Grant Lookalike.

WE OWN THIS CITY

Sky Atlantic, June Tbc Having flitted off to New York and New Jersey for his last two series, David Simon returns to the extremely mean streets of Baltimore for the true-ish tale of how the city’s Gun Trace Task Force became as bad as the crooks they were targeting in the noughties. Very similar in tone to The Wire, it stars The Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, a dirty cop who’s currently inmate number 62928-037 at a federal prison in Kentucky. SLOW HORSES Apple TV Fans of old school John Le Carré-style spy yarns will love this six-part adaptation of the Mick Herron novel of the same name, which focuses on a group of errant agents that MI5 want shot of but, for various reasons, can’t fire. Having previously brought George Smiley to such glorious life, Gary Oldman stars as Jackson Lamb, a Falstaff-ian character with a God – or should that be Devil? – given talent for exploiting people’s weaknesses. If you missed the weekly episodes, the good news is that you can binge on all of it now!

BROUGHT TO BOOK

PAGE-TURNERS FOR THE BEACH – AND THE TRAIN!

POGUEMAHONE

PATRICK McCABE Unbound

In his 1989 novel Carn, Irish novelist Patrick McCabe examined the slow decay of a windswept town. Now 30 years and two Booker Prize shortlistings – for The Butcher Boy (1992) and Breakfast On Pluto (1998) – later, he explores the crumbling of a more significant construction: the human mind.

Poguemahone is told through the wandering recollections of Dan Fogarty, an Irish immigrant living in England with his now elderly and dementiaplagued sister, Una. Through Dan’s raw and unsparing prose, we learn of Una’s struggles, in an inhospitable world of drugs and violence in 1970s London. As Una’s past is slowly illuminated, Dan’s mysterious role in the story becomes ever more sinister.

Like listening to a friend confess their life story after one too many pints, Poguemahone is a rustic and irreverent tragedy of tormented souls and macabre humour. Though its characters are often repugnant, you can’t resist their bizarrely compellingcompany – like a horrific roadside accident that’s somehow impossible to look away from Poguemahone is enthralling. NOAH KATZ CITY ON FIRE

DON WINSLOW Harper Collins

There’s an uneasy peace in Providence, R.I. in 1986. The Irish gang controls the docks, but the Italians have the rest of the city, and they can call on help from New York when it’s needed. John Murphy runs the Irish and has done since he took over from Marty Ryan, who hit the bottle after his wife left. Marty’s son, Danny, is also Murphy’s son-in-law. He tried to get away, to become a fisherman, but Dogtown dragged him back.

The fuse is lit, in this the first of a new trilogy from crime thriller maestro Winslow, when Liam, the youngest of the Murphys, crosses the line with Pam, Paulie Moretti’s new girl. Things fall apart. Pasco Ferri, who runs all of southern New England, is stepping back, so the Moretti brothers take the liberty of going after Liam. As reluctant as he might be to do so, Danny is faced with stepping up to protect those around him.

Readers of The Cartel Trilogy or the marvellous collection of shorts, Broken, will eat up this brilliant novel, which bodes very well indeed for parts two and three. The characters – Pasco looking for the quite life, Madeline McKay taking no shit from anyone, even the hopeless disaster Liam and the contrite Pam – are faultlessly drawn and the plot, which could easily have slipped into cliché, is tight as a rusted nut. PAT CARTY TRESPASSES

LOUISE KENNEDY Bloomsbury Easily living up to, and indeed surpassing, the promise shown in Kennedy’s debut short story collection, The End Of The World Is Cul De Sac, Trespasses tells the love story of Cushla Lavery. She’s a Catholic primary school teacher, who also helps out in her brother Eamonn’s bar, in 1970s Belfast. We’re not specifically told the era in question, but Johnny Giles is playing for Leeds, Chinatown is in the cinema, and Cockney Rebel are on the radio. The children in her school speak with the vocabulary of the Troubles; Father Slattery is the kind of tormenting priest that those of us of a certain age will remember; and it’s best to scrub Wednesday’s ashes off your forehead before serving in the bar.

Cushla meets Michael, a Protestant solicitor. He’s married but the affair intensifies. She meets his posh friends, they spend a weekend in Dublin, although “even after six years of carnage Belfast was cleaner”, she hears of previous dalliances and knows they’re doomed, but she loves him. Cushla also becomes entangled, through a young pupil Davey, with the McGeowns, the only Catholic family on a Protestant estate. Because of the location and the time, you’re conditioned to expect bad things to happen, and they do – but there is great pleasure to be found in Kennedy’s funny, poignant, wellobserved, and, crucially, impartial storytelling while you wait. Hers truly is an exceptional talent. PAT CARTY

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