‘I’ve never felt that I’ve ever quite got it right, not even once, not at all’ (Columbo)

If ever a single line captured the emotional heart of an album, it is this.  The first full-length from Hubert Selby Junior Infants is an album bathed in a darkly fermenting realisation that the lifelong belief that if you do the right things, it pays off in the end, doesn’t necessarily hold true.  You may be more at ease with yourself, but life’s outcomes don’t change.  It is expressed not as disappointment as such, but rather a world-weary resignation that life isn’t, well, all that fair.

This follow-up to the Dublin band’s excellent 2024 debut EP, Have You Ever Seen A Crow…Or An Eel, sees their propulsive, grunge-tinged post-hardcore provide a muscular counterpoint to this dawning realisation – driving guitars and a notably limber rhythm section readily shift from locked-in grooves to more abrasive ruptures with fluid dexterity.  A blend that is compellingly captured on the swelling, oscillating Columbo and Build Me A Monster.

However, the defining energy is arguably courtesy of the bleakly evocative melodicism that shrouds the album and infuses the downhearted but by no means defeated vocals.  They emerge as a fractured, melodically poetic flow that is, perhaps, a nod to the writing of the novelist after who the band are named.  The result is a hypnotically powerful one yet also one in which the nagging thought that ‘Everyone loves a good bad decision ’til it’s time to clean the mess up’ (Dumb As An Ox) is rarely far from the surface.