One of my unshakable musical beliefs is that a good song can translate into any format. This has been proven incorrect just once: Bon Jovi’s execrable This Left Feels Right, a truly dreadful thing.
The theory is bang on here.
Back in 2024 — and as an aside, I am not having it that this wasn’t last year, and have even Googled it in indignation, only to discover I was wrong — The Virginmarys released The House Beyond The Fires. Even as a fan of long standing, I am here to tell you it is their best record.
Loud, distorted, punky, but crucially deeply personal even for them, it spawned one of the great songs of the last couple of years, “There Ain’t No Future”.
And exhibit A to prove my point is that track.
Here, the craft in the lyrics really comes through. When Ally Dickaty sings, “the hills are alive with the sound of depression,” before a haunting guitar solo, the defence rests. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t sort of expected that you mention more than one song in an album review.
With a different track-listing this time, Beyond The House Of Fires begins with “My Nettle”, and here, as on the brilliant “Urban Seagull”, the piano that Dickaty plays is brought to the fore, so that when he sings, “I wasn’t built for these times, I’m not equipped in the mind,” it really drags you in.
“Dance To The City” has a grandiosity this time, and the put-down of “democracy” that is “You’re A Killer” perhaps has even more resonance now than it did then.
The single “White Knuckle Riding” is a favourite of the singer’s, but more than that, it is one of his most personal songs ever. “The drugs can’t compensate for love” hangs over the whole album.
“Lies Lies Lies” is hypnotic, and the hook, “everything is lost”, is raw, as if ripped from somewhere deep inside.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Big Country recently, as I became engrossed in a book about Stuart Adamson, and he might well approve of the passion in the words of “Where Are You Now?”, not to mention the ambition.
“When The Lights Go Down” is typical of the record in that it allows the words to breathe more, and the closer, “Veteran Soldiers” — the only one of the ten that wasn’t on the original record — casts them as battle-scarred, yet shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps they are at this point. Still standing after all this time.
And if their early albums were youthful indiscretions and small-town frustration, these versions of these songs are about coming to terms with what’s left.
It is astonishing how different these songs are here, and as brilliant as the original album was, this is equally so. Beyond The House Of Fires is the second side of a quite brilliant whole.
Rating 9/10
