Sometimes, songwriters are so intricately wrapped up in the creative process that when it comes to rationally explaining what their songs are about, it is perhaps best to allow their songs to speak for themselves. “I float sometimes when you’re around,” Fionn Regan sings on Islands, one of 11 gossamer-like songs on his seventh album. Any journalist or pod/broadcaster who has attempted to interview the Co Wicklow musician will know that feeling: he can skate around topics like Torvill and Dean and never get to the centre of the ice rink.
Regan’s music doesn’t require such concentrated focus, however. That elusiveness is, perhaps, best described by Regan himself in a typically metaphor-driven quote: “I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards ... There’s a quality about it where it’s always magic hour.”
Such irritating definitions have been his calling cards from his 2006 debut album, The End of History, to his 2019 album, Cala, but dear God, the man’s songs are stone-cold sublime. The title track is a perfect example of just how good the songs are. Written, as was the entire album, in the Majorcan town of Deià (in the home of his good friend Anna Friel, the actor, who accompanies him on backing vocals), there is a woozy, euphoric sense of intimacy to it. “There’s not a lot to say until you are back this way ...”
Elemental imagery abounds, with song titles directly referencing the location in which they were written: Teix Mountains, Swimming the Lakes, Islands, Deià Song/Llucalcari (the latter pinpointing Majorca’s smallest village, where Picasso once lived). It is Regan’s homage-like allusions that make O Avalanche the beautiful piece of work it is. Clearly influenced by the environment around him (”You’re sat there in the mountains looking towards the cities, rather than the other way”), it is reasonable to say that the songs are host to their own distinctive sun-dappled backdrops. Winter is coming? Not when you listen to O Avalanche.
