The Murder Capital : Blindness
Rumors of indie rock’s demise are not all that exaggerated. The days when the genre consistently produced new or innovative sounds on a mass scale are gone. There remain some maverick acts using the genre’s raw materials to find new or unusual sonic avenues, but in terms of the style’s biggest and most influential acts, revivalism is now their game, be it post-punk, grunge, psych rock etc. That’s not to say that justly acclaimed recent albums by major acts like Fontaines D.C., Mannequin Pussy and MJ Lenderman are not fit-to-burst with individual personality and adroit lyrical observations about the world today, just that their sonic palettes do not reflect the present, nor do they innovate or create music that hasn’t already been in existence for several decades.
If this seems like an unfair standard to hold music to, think of rock music’s past and how many new subgenres emerged in the twenty years between the 1960s and 1980s alone. This relentless forward momentum gradually slowed and is now recursively looping back on itself. Dublin post-punk’s The Murder Capital are a middling example of this current crop of indie rock tail-eaters. Everything that they do well on their second full-length Blindness are things that remind you of endless things from the past. There’s the taut, double hi-hat-led Joy Division energy on the likes of “Can’t Pretend To Know” and “That Feeling,” which also mirror acts from the first, noughties post-punk revival like Editors and White Lies. Further retro signifiers are scattered across these eleven tracks; see the post-Britpop swagger on “A Distant Life” and The Verve/Spiritualized dream rock of “Words Lost Meaning”.
However, in between these copies of copies are several moments that nonetheless charm and exhilarate. The jittery “Death Of A Giant” employs unusual, fun guitar lines of the kind that Jonny Greenwood frequently deploys in The Smile. There’s also “Love Of Country,” an engrossing epic that spins gripping, if familiar verses of doom-laden of Celtic poetry. Closer “Trailing A Wing” also finds a sense of poetry in its simplicity, providing Blindness with a wise, soothing and lyrical coda. These moments are strong enough to show The Murder Capital are teeming with ideas, however these ideas are consistently ones that have been put to use by several generations of acts before them. Whether or not that will bother you is down to you alone, but there has to come a time when as listeners we start to question every wave of post-punk bands and ask ourselves; can we not do a bit better than this?
Label: Human Season
Year: 2025
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