Track Of The Week :: The Murder Capital - Don't Cling To Life

Words: Linn Branson 

There's no getting away from this having been something of The Murder Capital's week, with the release of their third single, 'Don't Cling To Life'.

The track, like its predecessors 'Green & Blue' and 'Feeling Fades' - hear the three below - all come from the band's forthcoming debut album, ‘When I Have Fears’, out next month (August 16).

Premiered by Steve Lamacq earlier in the week on his BBC 6 Music show, Lamacq also reprised it on Thursday's Roundtable, where Jon McClure, Lucy Rose and Phil Taggart all gave it a resounding thumbs up. The track even prompted actor Craig Parkinson - best known for his role as DS Matt 'Dot' Cottan in the acclaimed drama series Line Of Duty - to post on Twitter: "Special moving stuff here from The Murder Capital. Get it."

The affecting video for 'Don't Cling To Life' also arrived on Tuesday. Directed once again by Ethan Barrett and Tom Gullam (who both produced the band's 'Green & Blue' video), the imagery takes the grief embedded in the lyrics lines of the song ("And as it feigns a deadly grip / The world collapses ‘round my room / The water floats the floors adrift... / The light that once shone on the pale / Our steady hands return to stone / Let’s stay enclosed for all our days / Failing this let’s dance and cry / So we remember why we die / Don’t cling to life / There’s nothing on the other side"), and translates it into another artistic form.

The album's title 'When I Have Fears' and the running theme throughout - and where this particular song fits in - is woven around the John Keats poem of the same name. Keats had a fear of an early death, of dying before he had completed his mission to write all the poetry he believed he had in him. Tje fear was to be a prescient one. He wrote the 14-line poem in January 1818, three years before he died at the age of 25 of tuberculosis.

For me, personally, 'Don't Cling To Life' stands in fourth place amongst the 10 tracks on the album. Which may appear as a criticism which it isn't. In fact, it is more intended to say that if something as good as this is not even in the top three... hell, there'll be some craic to be had in the watering holes of Dublin on the night of release.