Brendan and Declan Murphy have never been especially careerist or commercial-minded. They’ve always done their own thing, which hasn’t always been a good thing. Had the Newry band (I think there were five of them at the time) slogged the States on the back of their 1989 debut Songs For The Tempted, they’d probably never have come back. Instead, possibly shell-shocked from their sudden rise to prominence on this side of the pond, they chose to return to the studio rather than tour. 1992’s Man Alive was a full-on rock record when the vast majority of their established audience were popping pills and going raving. Painfully perfectionist, they then scrapped what would’ve been their third album, having spent three years working on it.
Eventually, after what pretty much amounted to a seven-year silence, they released the solid Classified Personal in 1999. It took another four years for them to produce Heaven & Hell, but it was well worth the wait. Nervy, edgy and utterly beautiful, it was a certified masterpiece.
It’s taken just three years for Fingerprints, which is actually very quick by their standards. Unsurprisingly, it’s not Heaven & Hell II, but another subtle segue into different territory. It opens with the epic ‘Wildflower’, distinguished by Declan’s gently strummed guitar and Brendan’s instantly recognisable vocal: “To find a rose I held thorns/Until my hands were ripped and torn/But you’re a master of disguise/And I have come to realise/ There’s no temple, there’s no shrine/ To keep you confined/Out of sight, I’m running blind.”
The rather standard ‘Thrill Me’ is the closest thing to a filler track on the record, but ‘Free Spirit’ is a soaring classic. More spoken than sung, the deeply melancholic and regretful ‘Blue’ ranks as one of the most hauntingly beautiful things they’ve done, up there with Prince’s ‘Sometimes It Snows In April’.
The rest is a scattering of pickings so rich it’s hard to pick stand-outs (though the pleading ‘Disconnected’ is a real gem). It ends on a dark and lonely note with ‘Late Night Destruction’ (“Sometimes in the early hours/ I want nothing in my head”). Then you play it again.
Fingerprints won’t be leaving my stereo anytime soon. Musically deep, textured and multi-layered, and lyrically older, wiser and slightly more fucked up, it seems to get better and better with every listen.