Album Review: Seamus Fogarty, Ships

You shouldn’t judge books by their covers. Albums - they're different. One could argue that every great LP sounds like its sleeve looks.

Such is the case with Mayo native Seamus Fogarty’s latest, Ships, which is fronted by a painting of its titular vessel floating in a sea of styles: oil, monograph, charcoal. His music has long earned plaudits for doing something similar, through mixing folk and electronica.

Fogarty returns to his familiar palette, exploring how people, places, things, and symbols are shaped by time. Opener ‘Come Down To The Square’ is a short ditty depicting mad street preachers, Union Jacks flying, and people dancing in central London. It’s what the city has always been like, but Fogarty’s observation that the “old ways are dying” creates an ominous scene.

‘Fire’ is a standout, with its driving drumbeat, Wings-era McCartney bassline, and two-chord progression providing a spine for Fogarty’s verse on falling in and out of inspiration. Nostalgia and mourning creep through on ‘I Passed Your House’, where, over a four-on-the-floor stomp and an image of a familiar old house, he reflects on losing a friend.

Celebrity worship is examined on ‘They Recognised Him’, a darkly funny song tracking a man from his rise to fame to his funeral, showing how even the most mundane moments in life become public obsessions, depending on who’s living them. There’s more vivid storytelling on ‘The Last Days of Watchmaker Joe’: a tale of an old watchmaker who builds his own coffin to die in, as a haunting Eastern drone and the singer’s repetitive meter combine to hypnotic effect.

Brimming with poetic expression and detailed production, Ships is an album well worth getting on board with.

• Listen to Ships below: