There Is Hope

Love’s tough when it doesn’t work out. Most of us have been there. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy chases girl… and fails to win her heart back. Where does boy (or girl, for that matter) go from there? If you happen to be facing that particular dilemma at the moment, dear reader, then fear not, for help is at hand.

Released on his own Mangomusic label, the second album from young Dublin-based singer/songwriter Steve Fanagan, offers you the complete A-Z of unrequited love – beginning as a relationship ends ("So you hide yourself from my eyes," are the first words we hear), ending as a new one begins and charting the painful bits in between with some of the most heartfelt lyrics and gorgeously restrained melodies you’ll hear this side of Will Oldham.

Recorded over an intense two days last April in Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio Studios, this short (less than forty minutes) but perfectly formed release also features the respective talents of Ross Hacket and Joss Moorken’s of Dublin’s hilariously named Joan Of Arse, and brothers Rob and Dan Sullivan from Chicago based act Songs:Ohia. Throughout, their contributions are superb – gently strummed low-fi soundscapes that never get in the way of the poetry of the lyrics. Occasionally a full-on Albini guitar workout seems imminent, but they always pull back at the right moment.

Although more of a musical journey than a collection of songs (and therefore best heard as a whole), it’s not without standalone moments. ‘Done And Dusted’ confronts the horror of a love gone stale – "As we lie here together/Our bodies gone cold" – but somehow manages to comfort. On the excellent ‘One Thousand’, Fanagan croons, "And now you’re 3,000 miles away/It’s hard not to think of you 3,000 more/Every day."

By closer ‘Be My Breath’, the old love has faded and a new one has blossomed – "breathing hope into me" – and, although now laden down with baggage from his past, the narrator is ready to try again.

Lovely, lonely and laconic, There Is Hope is a veritable masterpiece of melancholia. By offering us this sonic shoulder to cry on, Fanagan has done the work of a thousand Samaritans.