The Swell Season – Strict Joy

The Swell Season

In 2007 John Carney, armed with some handy cams and a fairly small budget, asked old band mate and The Frames front man Glen Hansard to contribute some songs to his independent Irish film called Once. The film at that time starred Cillian Murphy and a Czech musician called Marketa Irglova. After a few disputes, actor Cillian Murphy dropped out of the project and John Carney instead employed Glen Hansard to play the lead role.

The film was a surprise hit and launched Glen and Marketa’s musical project, The Swell Season, into international stardom. The film also paralleled the real life relationship between the duo, who got together during the filming. With Strict Joy we are given a front row seat to their real life break up.

The album opens to the Van Morrison-esque ‘Low Rising’. The song seems to suggest that our two protagonists (Glen and Mar) have reached rock bottom, and the only way is up. This is not true. There is little light to this album of heartbreak.

The ambiguous nature of some of the lyrics adds a healthy amount of intensity. You are never quite sure if one is writing about the other. It is an interesting way of turning a hurtful situation into creativity, and it only serves to make the album more powerful.

Musically, the album is much more similar to later releases by The Frames. There is more going on here. ‘Feeling The Pull’ is an agitated anti-love song full of Hansard’s trademark expressive vocals, which serves to illustrate the diversity found on this album. The Swell Season’s first self-titled album was nice, but failed to really get the pulse racing at any point. You got the feeling of listening to left over songs, a little too soft for The Frames. More than anything, with Strict Joy the band sound like they are well on the way to perfecting their own sound.

‘I Have Loved You Wrong’ is a song written entirely by Marketa Irglova, and to me it is the heart of the album. The broken heart perhaps, but there is something so devastatingly beautiful about hearing the fragile Irglova singing “Forgive me lover, for I have sinned/For I have done you wrong”, accompanied by music that recalls Sigur Ros in space and slow galloping melody. Fading out to a lush vocal harmony, it seems the album can’t get any sadder.

Enter the final track and live favourite, ‘Back Broke’. This song is just plain dark. I would have liked it if the album had at least a nearly happy ending, but it was not to be. As Hansard says in the sign off, “Back broke, and smiling”.

Aside from the album itself, it is worth saying that the limited edition of the album is one of the best value packages I have seen in a long time. For the price of a regular single disc CD, I got the new album, a live CD and a beautiful live DVD movie. Every piece of material in this package is stunningly performed and presented, and if you are a fan of Glen and Mar, or just folk in general, this is an essential purchase.

Richer, more interesting and more mature, Strict Joy is a beautifully crafted album of heartbreak, frustration and regret, but it somehow also manages to be at times uplifting, and always an absolute joy to listen to.

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