Fontaines D.C.
Skinty Fia

LA RECENSIONE

The third album by the Irish band Fontaines DC, as the title suggests, reveals a desperate need to empty the tank, possibly with slim-waisted girls. It's no surprise it has been titled "Skinny Figa". The first song has an Irish title which roughly translates to "even if she gave it to half the school, it's fine with me" – implicitly – "as long as she gives it to me too". The literary topos of the 'fessa' returns obsessively in all the songs of the album, even the moose with red lights on the cover is a symbolist delirium, a symptom of an intrusive longing for 'figa', inserting itself into every crevice. In "Jackie Down the Line", the singer Grian treats the instrumental backdrop as if it were a letter in which he declares to the popular Jackie that he's worn out from masturbating in the bathroom thinking about her, and now needs real love, especially on a physical level. In short, yes, he wants to have sex and doesn't know how, and this drives him crazy. "Everybody gets a big shot baby" suggests the fantasy of vehemently darting at one's crush's décolleté.

It takes some courage to title an album "Skinny Figa", a great honesty in telling one's story, in opening one's heart to the listener. For Grian Chatten, it's pure therapy in the form of post-punk post-pollution, dark in mood because another day has passed without the 'figa' answering the call. At the end of the first verse of "Roman Holiday", the singer ends up shouting SKINNY FIGA as if he's praying to the heavens to send him half a one willing to give it to him, but judging by the mood of the song and in general all the subsequent ones that make up the album, it’s understood that the plea hasn't been answered.

Just to scrape together not even a score but half a make-out session from the school queen’s best friend (obviously less pretty than her), Grian even tries singing a song with the accordion, accentuating the nasal tone in an expressionist key, as in I’m pining for you, I’m sensitive, fuck me now please, but absolutely nothing. By the ninth song, frustration is so exhausting that the title is "I Love You". Our protagonist then plays the card of pure declaration, like the medieval poets, and just like them receives a thumping rejection in its most heartbreaking form: the indifference of the interlocutor. By the tenth and final track, the only thing left was to title it "Nabokov", partly in the hope of having sex by quoting a literary master who appeals to girls in black tights and bobbed blue hair (clear recipients of the frontman’s onanism), partly to call this girl a Lolita, ergo a coquettish whore, because after three post-punk albums from an expert music enthusiast, she still hasn't been impressed by Chatten's artistic sensitivity. This masterpiece of darkness and Ireland is absolutely the best album ever written about the inability to communicate with women, a trait that unites this band unbreakably with its admirers.