Cala

Description

Fionn Regans new album Cala starts as it means to continue: Wear this crown of light for you on this August moon.

The opening line of Calas opening song, Collar Of Fur, combines elemental and romantic imagery with an equally luminescent melody and subtly keening vocal set like jewels in delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar and atmospherics, as Regan hears it: Sparse cinematic moments, like a super-eight movie. The scene is set for a spine-tingling spell of a record, named after the Spanish word for cove, bathed in the balmy rays of summer and the iridescent light of that August moon. Ten songs and 35 minutes long, Cala is a concise statement but with deep pockets to tumble into, drawn by Regans drowsy beauty and nuanced narratives.

Its been this way with Regan, give or take the odd detour into busier/band territory, since his 2006 album debut The End Of History. As it happens, Regan hears a link in Calas tone and setting to that first record. Both albums were written at Regans home in Bray, on Dublins coastal outskirts, which might partly explain Calas recurring imagery: stars, moon, ocean, sun The album does have fundamentally elemental, visual components, he agrees. I wouldnt mind knowing why! Its a mystery to me, how songs evolve. Thankfully, they do. But Ive never got anywhere when Ive tried to work it out. Yet, as Regan concedes, the place youre from continues to resonate.

The sound of Cala also performed entirely by Regan is similarly drawn from intuition, rooted in acoustic guitar and sometimes piano, and those atmospherics a kickdrum here, a footstamp there, some slight modern twists influenced by the time period were in. Ive not overthought it much. I hope the songs can shine in that way. The song comes first, then the sonic palate, then the words give a sense of place, or landscape.

If there is a real place where these exquisitely haunting songs reside, its somewhere close to heaven: The sand dunes and the stars, the moon is a tambourine / The perfume of her skin, cheekbones are diamonds set (Riverside Heights), She wears a veil of stars / lightning is bottled in the city lights / they blur howling to the glaciers (Glaciers). The title track enigmatically details, twenty miles of amber. Calas last words come from Under The Waves / Tokyo, a simple and piercing couplet that underlines the records entwined elemental/romantic helix: When youre here tomorrow night / Ill sing to you with my jaw of light.

Other images hint at Regans emotional swirls and eddies. Head Swim describes a Baudelaire Mojave ghost foxtrot in your cha cha heels. The outstanding title track refers to an Anglo-French legend (Effortless like Birkin is / basket and her jeans cut high). The Ocean Wave mentions the Cronebane, an ancient Irish coin. The song title Volca also sounds ancient, and even refers to the word (Along the coast, the ancient stars hold sway) but is prosaically named after the drum machine that ripples beneath, almost silently. Brass Locket relocates to America, specifically Tennessee, the Hudson river, the Catskills and Manhattans upper west and lower east sides. I started to write a couple of songs in New Yorkthe setting is real, but theyre word games, the narrative is fiction, my imagination, Regan explains. Its back to the idea of cinema.

Over the course of five sublime albums (Cala is his sixth), the man who has been nominated for Mercury, Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, tattooed on actor Rhys Ifans arm (the lyric Be good or be gone), and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society knows that rewards and recognition dont come close to what truly matters. Im just so lucky to play music, Regan says. And were so lucky to have him.