Fionn Regan - The End of History Album Review

Fionn Regan
The End of History
Album Review

Fionn Regan has just made one of the most engaging singer-songwriter albums in years. A bold statement if ever there was one, but, hear me out. The End of History is a compelling, and often heartbreaking record, infinitely better than the glorified-Hallmark-greeting-cards-as-songs that chancers like James Blunt put out to a gullible public.

The album is primarily just Regan and a deftly picked acoustic guitar, but is sparsely embellished with electric guitar and piano, resulting in a collection of songs with plenty of space within their skeletal, fragile arrangements.

These arrangements perfectly compliment the desolate rootsiness of the lyrics, many songs sounds like they have drifted out of the woods, calling out for someone to follow the sound. Highlight, "Hey Rabbit" is the best example, where to a barren acoustic backing, Regan croons about nature being destroyed, a "badger with his mouth round an aerosol can" and the rabbit being displaced by a car park. But this is converged with a sense of lost-love and loneliness, the landscape of the bleak countryside being mirrored in his despondency.

And this is a theme that runs through the record, "Put A Penny In The Slot" is the sound of a man singing for his isolation while the one he loves has gone. He is surrounded by stinging nettles and dock leaves while she "goes out looking for a taxi", he even gets in a reference to Saul Bellow for crying out loud, and the album's title in a reference to an essay of the same name by Francis Fukuyama. This is smart, literate folk, the likes of which ye will never hear emanating from the frozen food section in Asda.

Fionn Regan is clearly a natural storyteller, on "Snowy Atlas Mountains" you can feel the frosty cold and the irrational fear you get when in a house alone, "If you pull a hatchet/ I'll pull something to match it" he near whispers, over the sounds of "wolves on the radio." With a jumper soaked in pig's blood against a backdrop of cymbal crashes and feedback, Regan's menace threatens to engulf the track at any moment.

In short, this is an album with no duff tracks, well, the closer "Bunker or Basement" outstays its welcome slightly, but that's a minor quibble, and is an album which reveals more of itself to you with every listen, until you are completely immersed in Regan's skewed world. A must buy for anyone who likes music.

Ben Davis