Album reviews: Impressive offerings from Irish acts Fish Go Deep and Nealo
Fish Go Deep and Nealo: Two artists with new music out this week
- Fish Go Deep
- What I Mean By Beautiful
- ★★★★☆
As prime movers in Cork’s 1990s house scene, Fish Go Deep duo Greg Dowling and Shane Johnson have long had their names lit up in stars.
They showed a different side with their excellent 2021 lockdown album, This Bit Of Earth – a rumination on isolation, loneliness and the sad ache of the neglected planet during the shutdown of society. But they're in a brisker frame of mind on their fourth LP, the wonderfully optimistic and energetic What I Mean By Beautiful.
It's a propulsive work that finds the pair reconnecting with their past while staying grounded in the present. There's a haunting ambient quality to opener 'I Float in the Clouds' while they celebrate their house roots on subterranean groover 'You Came Into My Life'.
The best is saved for last: 'Be Brave' is a collaboration with writer Lisa McInerney and Young Offenders star Hilary Rose that pulsates with quiet wonder – the perfect capstone on a glitteringly effective LP.
- Nealo
- November Medicine
- ★★★★☆
It's been a long road for Dublin rapper and poet (and former hardcore rocker) Neal Keating, whose excellent second album arrives three years after his debut, All The Leaves Are Falling – and following several lifetimes of turmoil. Personally and in his career, life has had its challenges for Nealo. That journey from darkness into the light is chronicled unflinchingly across November Medicine.
Too much partying, the challenges of sustaining an artistic existence in a country often indifferent to the struggles of musicians, and the daily grind of being a human being in a complicated world... All serve as grist for Nealo's empathic and open-hearted hip hop.
Gentle washes of piano introduce 'Absent Hearted'. Here, Nealo observes that he spent too many years “making chemistry with the wrong shit” and pivots into a cry of despair at the arrival on Irish shores of the scourge of racism.
If the lyrics are punchy, it’s in his grooves that Nealo truly shines. 'Spirit Totem' is a soulful bopper; 'Forest' trembles with an autumnal ache as Keating laments the unravelling of his marriage. It’s heavy going – though interspersed with humour, such as when, in a hilarious spoken word segment, Nealo recalls taking hallucinogens and mistaking cat hair for the fabric of the universe.
