This seven-piece outfit, who have done well at festivals and showcases in Ireland, including the Hard Working Class Heroes festival, will have a lot of appeal for many, especially those who like their indie and electronics mixed together like Radiohead sometimes achieve. Add to this a touch of nebulous, interspersed Bloc Party and you have the approximate elements of this album’s well-produced sound. Their finest track in this collection, for it is hard to call it an album somehow with the tracks being so juxtaposed, is the very vibrant 'Don’t Sweat The Smaller Shit'. It is a beaming song full of luscious action (that's luscious action, not Luscious Jackson) on the melody front, and a sense of real evocation is signalled. This gives the track a kind of force, especially as we return to it for a reprise at the album's end.
The other songs allude to a kind of rainy hopelessness/hope, more of the kin of The Frames or some of Glen Hansard’s more recent solo offerings, which is what you’d expect from voices raised by Dublin streets, and the female vocals are at times beautifully placed to compliment the slightly harsher male voice, and this helps with the elegance which they steer straight towards on occasion. 'Throw The Babies To The Wolves' is soft and deceiving, a great album track hidden away in this parcel, indeed, a couple of the later tracks here are like presents you might overlook at first, even fault, but then come to appreciate like a Christmas Stilton or perhaps a glass of neutral milk.
Lyrically brilliant at times, the formulated feel to this collection of tracks and the almost careless sense of a hybrid genre-creation to the work could leave you with a taste of something slightly unsuccessful. 'Screamadelica' it is not. Somehow I almost feel the listener should be paid with more concern or respect. Not everyone likes to waver between the uplifting and the despondent unless it is done with some true thread of artistry, which is what this album perhaps lacks. I'm left feeling that five tracks (add certainly to the two already mentioned ‘Plausible Deniability’ and ‘Dig it up’) would have made a fine EP. It's sense of reality time for Cfit; if they made no more albums would this have the same near-cult value as The Plague Monkeys debut album? No, but that is a high target. Yet many will find some real appeal in this album's intelligence and diversity - 'Triage' is still definitely worth putting on the windowsill for that overcast, rainy day with the hope and possibility of something fine forecasted.
Cfit's website
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