FINGERPRINTS Album review | The Mail on Sunday

It’s unusual to produce the album of your career 17 years after the release of your first one – but The 4 Of Us have done just that. Fingerprints boasts 12 tracks of immense quality that surpass those on Songs For The Tempted, the album that announced the Newry band to the world in 1989.

At that time, songs such as Mary, Drag My Bad Name Down and Washington Down set The 4 Of Us apart from the sub-U2-sounding Dublin bands or the traditionally rawer bands from the rest of their native Ulster. They were neither totally a rock band nor a pop band. There were elements of folk music in the mix too, but you could dance to them – it was all a bit confusing.

‘That’s certainly a product of living in a border town,’ lead singer Brendan Murphy says. ‘Growing up, we listened to RTE and BBC. We could be listening to Planxty one minute and The Police the next. I think that, not coming from a big city, we had no particular scene to influence us. We pretty much made everything up as we went along.’

Formed around the song-writing talents of Brendan and his brother Declan, members and collaborators have come and gone but the brothers continue to plough their own furrow.

‘There are times when we have been making records and we’ve known we haven’t been in step with what’s going on, but you just continue to do what you do. Then the musical climate changes and you are in sync with what’s going on. I think, with this record, that is what has happened.’

The current climate features a handful of bands, including Coldplay and Keane, who are intent on crafting songs – not worrying about image – and who still find a massive audience. The 4 Of Us deserve a slice of that action.

If, thus far, Mary has been their finest hour, then make room in your head and heart for Into Your Arms. On the face of it a simple ballad, it can, on the one hand, be viewed as a song declaring undying love, but the line: ‘I will fall, till the morning comes, into your arms’, suggests something very different. Murphy confesses to the ambiguity, and won’t clarify. ‘It is open to that interpretation, I know what it’s about, and I’m not saying.’

Other songs, such as Wildflower; What’s To Come and the next single, Blue, deserve to be heard widely but, frankly and sadly, it has not happened yet.

It’s not uncommon for a band to produce their best work when the spotlight has long ceased bathing them in its warm glow. Green Day and Snow Patrol’s respective renaissances occurred while their professional obituaries were being prepared. David Gray released White Ladder himself, after years of frustration with a major record label.

‘Even when we stopped selling loads of albums, it didn’t stop us making another one.’ Murphy says with a touch of defiance. ‘I’m not going to lie and say I don’t care whether this record sells or not.’

‘We released the last couple of albums ourselves but this is on a major label and that means more people will have the chance to buy it, but I want this to be really successful because it’s really bloody good.’

That sort of obstinacy and defiance can serve a band well but, when it’s combined with a perfectionist streak, it can be destructive. They have junked whole albums worth of recordings and started from scratch. Since 1989, just five albums hardly marks them down as prolific.

Man Alive, released in 1992, was a solid follow-up to their debut but then they junkeed the next one, not re-appearing until 1999 with Classified Personal.

‘What is the point of releasing something you’re not happy with?’ Murphy asks. ‘When it’s been released, it’s out there and you have to live with it, you can’t change it then. Perfectionists? We’ve been called worse!’

‘If you still feel that you can attain greatness, whether it be with one song, once or twice in a song, or even in only a note, you strive all the time for that.’

They’ve done that here: Flesh And Bone is just a couple of minutes long but it says everything it needs to.

Late Night Destruction explores the concept of dulling emotional pain with hedonistic indulgence. Indeed, the songs on the album are full of the bittersweet, the double standards, the darkness that may not amount to light.

‘You know, that is the key to a lot of brilliant songs, I think’, Murphy says. ‘Black and White doesn’t interest us. As for whether we are prolific or not, I look at a band like The Blue Nile. In their whole career, they’ve only released four albums, is it? But they’re among the best albums ever made,’

That’s true, and this is the best album The 4 Of Us have made, It’ll be a shame if only a small number of people discover just how good it is.