Album: Fionn Regan <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

The End of History, BELLA UNION

At the other extreme to James Morrison's cliché-mongering is the lyrical approach of Fionn Regan, a singer-songwriter whose chief addition to the nu-folk revival is an outlandish way with imagery and a disregard for the niceties of plot and character. The closest he gets to a proper metaphor here is the line "My vehicle is in your drive", implying adultery. More typical is the opener "Be Good Or Be Gone", in which non-sequitur images - a child actress being born, a museum closing, the narrator becoming an aerial view of a town - are yoked together by a winning hook and pleasing guitar part. Literary ambitions are evident in references to Paul Auster and Saul Bellow, but there's no comparable narrative drive; instead, as Regan suggests in "Hey Rabbit", "Ideas are like sparrows/ They dart down the hall, the chimney, and out of the spout/ Down a wormhole, and back out of my mouth". Is that better than having "someone else pulling the steering reins", as he claims elsewhere? A tricky blighter, Johnny Muse.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Be Good Or Be Gone', 'Snowy Atlas Mountains', 'The Underwood Typewriter'