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SOUND MURDEROUS INTENT Formed a little over a yea
r ago, The Murder Capital have garnered the buzz through a handful of songs and select appearances. Now they are set to unleash their debut album. words Danny Wilson photo Gavin Ovoca When I reach Murder Capital’s Gabriel Paschal Blake by phone, he has just arrived in that evening’s venue. As he moves through the space looking for somewhere quiet to talk, doors audibly swing open, flights of stairs are ascended and descended. Faintly, in the background bandmates are intermittently audible in the midst of their own phone interviews with other (presumably lesser) publications. In these few moments before our conversation starts in earnest, two truths are evident. Firstly, A LOT of people seem to want to talk to The Murder Capital and the Dublin quintet are more than happy to oblige. Secondly, the band’s vision is a shared one. There is no single mouthpiece here, elected or decreed. Their forthcoming debut LP, When I Have Fears, was deeply collaborative in its conception and, fittingly, each and any of its five sharply dressed progenitors are primed and ready to discuss the fruits of their collective labour. Early in our conversation, it’s plain to see that the frank, unvarnished emotion that characterises their output thus far is deeply felt by all involved. This, as Gabriel is quick to elucidate, can lead to a degree of friction far beyond any of the tiresome vagaries of promotion associated with being a “buzzy” band. “The only time that we feel huge amounts of pressure, or it gets mad intense, is when the five of us are trying to come to a place where we all agree on something. When we’re trying to reach a point where we’re all 100 percent satisfied with the art we’re making and know it’s the best we can do. Those are the hardest moments in the band. It can get very intense. We all care about this equally and, obviously, with that comes a feeling that you need to fight very hard for any ideas you have. In the writing process, it can be difficult because you really believe your idea was right and somebody else feels exactly the same way about a different idea. It teaches you to have patience and to really work on how you communicate with each other. Otherwise, it can just end up with us calling each other fuckers and storming out of the room or throwing a tantrum or whatever. That’s why it ends up being good in the end, because every part of the song has been fought over. It can get pretty heated. I think that’s the way we try to approach everything.” A certain friction will come as no surprise to those exposed to the handful of prickly, propulsive post-punk transmissions that have garnered Murder Capital the aforementioned buzz. Expectations, and the subversion of such, are quickly revealing themselves as a major factor in the Murder Capital story. I wonder, considering the relative scarcity of recorded material and the rate at which the band are selling out venues, do they ever wonder what expectations audiences bring to these gigs? “At the start, people certainly came to [gigs] with the expectation of us just being a straight up post-punk band,” begins Gabriel. “As the writing of the album went on, we realised that wasn’t really what we wanted to be as a band; we wanted to have more diversity in the material, we thought the album should tell a full story. A lot of it is about the human condition, the human experience.” “We don’t feel frantic anger all the time. So, creating a record like that wouldn’t be true to who we are or, really, what life is. For the album, we tried to have an arc: a beginning, middle and end. The interesting thing about not having so much material out there already is that people’s expectations are usually driven by the word of mouth of other people who have been to the shows before.” This notion of an arc and the pursuit of a certain catharsis informed by a holistic vision of the breadth of human experience is not restricted to Murder Capital on wax. In fact, for Gabriel and his bandmates, every performance should strive to achieve this same goal. This perspective toward live performance cemented itself in the band’s vision as the album’s tracklisting gradually began to take shape, as Blake explans. “We had a set of songs written before we really committed to the vision of an album and the name, When I Have Fears, was there early on. We used that sentiment as kind of a pillar for any of the songs we were writing. There were plenty of times when we’d be working on writing a song that we were into but 78