Fontaines D.C. Romance Review: Dubliners shift focus on apocalyptic fourth LP
Inspired by Japanese manga and Italian cinema, Irish quintet’s new album searches for truth in a world gone wrong.
Notions of romance have always been integral to Fontaines D.C. As cash-strapped music students in Dublin, the band would wander its lanes, reciting poetry, swigging cans of cheap Tesco’s beer and singing their songs for whoever, even if that was only themselves. Their debut Dogrel drew on a critical but celebratory embrace of Ireland and Irish-ness, drank deep from their city’s outsider musical and literary heritage, then spat out an intense new rock variant: a millennial Thin Lizzy, or The Dubliners jamming with Joy Division. It was nothing if not romantic.
Follow-up A Hero’s Death both downplayed the craic and took its title from Brendan Behan, a quintessentially complicated Irish literary hero. 2022’s Skinty Fia viewed their relationship with the auld country from the ambiguous perspective of the diaspora. So there’s a logic to Fontaines’ fourth album narrowing the thematic focus – to love, essentially. Romance is a universal concept, and Romance transcends parochiality. With 10 of 11 songs recorded in France, and pre-produced in London where all the band currently reside, this is the first Fontaines D.C. LP with no overt musical references to their homeland. Theirs was always a tough love – remember Skinty Fia’s I Love You eviscerating an idealised Irish self-image and the systemic conservatism lurking beneath the state’s liberal makeover. As singer Grian Chatten says, “It’s important for me to establish my identity beyond that of my culture and my heritage.”
He cites two films as catalysts for the record: Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga adaptation Akira, made in 1988 and set in a dystopian 2019 – the year of Fontaines D.C.’s first album – and La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant 2013 dissection of privileged empty lives in contemporary Rome. The eternal city has a previous Fontaines citation: Skinty Fia’s Roman Holiday, an allegory of alienation. Now it feeds into the album’s thesis of love as denial, or a refuge from chaos, as per Akira’s subplot of romance blooming amid a broken society. Or as Chatten sings: “In the modern world, I don’t feel anything… And I don’t feel bad.”
A philosophical keystone, In The Modern World is also emblematic of _Romance’_s overall shiny but brittle grandeur, its sumptuous organic veneer fused with machine-tooled synthetics. The song was written in Los Angeles, and has the weary ache of the Golden State’s twilight queen Lana Del Rey, with its melancholy high desert guitar twangs, rapturous Spector-beats and twirling strings. The Lee Hazlewood flashbacks on Grian Chatten’s 2023 solo album now feel like prototypes for this magnificent slab of Hollyweird schlock.
The album is produced and mixed by James Ford, whose name doubtless came up during the Fontaines’ supporting gig on Arctic Monkeys’ last world tour. But his work with a previous generation’s superstar act is as instructive here. In 2023 Ford helped a grieving Depeche Mode make Memento Mori, a pragmatic yet soulful concord between their former and current selves. There’s something similarly clear-eyed about Romance, which has a focus that Skinty Fia lacked, and a steadier hand with the Robert Smith daubs than A Hero’s Death. The opening title track places sulphurous electro and sparse guitar amid netherworld clanking, very much à la Mode covering Wire’s Heartbeat, a song of faith and devotion from the beyond. “Into the darkness again,” Chatten begins. “Maybe romance is a place for me, and you.”
The beautiful Desire wears a similar velveteen fabric, building from plangent suspended arpeggios before throwing its arms around the nearest string quartet and going the full disintegration. “Deep they’ve designed you/From cradle to pyre/In the mortal attire,” croons Chatten, who’s soon detailing an Akira-worthy horrorscape, firefighters turning bodies to glass in the park. Yet the gloom quotient never eclipses the light. Ford has decluttered the band’s tendency to drama without denuding its character, a considerable achievement given the multiplicity of creative inputs, all demanding accommodation. Thus, Carlos O’Connell writes the lyric for Horseness Is The Whatness – its title a quote from James Joyce’s Ulysses –and fellow guitarist Conor Curley takes lead vocal on Sundowner, a stoned echo of Panda Bear’s Beach Boy elegies. Conor Deegan, meanwhile, uncannily plays In The Modern World’s female duettist. Chatten digs the collaborative stew. “So here’s the thing, I need commotion,” he avers amid Here’s The Thing’s urgent plasticky glam, Fontaines go dandy in the future world.
As each FDC record relies successively less on straightforward rock catharsis, so Chatten’s role feels ever more pivotal. His voice now has multiple personae, notably a Jeff Buckley doppelgänger on Romance’s upper register peals. His lyrical flow, meanwhile, makes pretty much every song an event. Starburster grips hard, with its hyperventilated troglodyte rhyming of “canister”, “Salinger” and “the pig on the Chinese calendar” evoking ’90s NYC psychedelic hip-hop duo New Kingdom (alternatively, Chatten has claimed he was channelling Korn). The more conventionally arranged Bug still has him threading words like a tessellated moving pavement: “Yeah, they threw me out like I was a wedding bouquet/Now I can’t quite remember what I had to say”. With the music’s adjacency to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, it occurs that just like The Smiths, this is a rock band with both a fresh vocabulary and behavioural code.
Bug’s euphoria throttles down into the competing Bad Seed cacophonies of Motorcycle Boy, and thence the shadowy pairing of Curley and O’Connell’s spotlight moments. At which point we are, it must be said, a long way from Boys In The Better Land – doubtless an ongoing source of regret for some. Yet the album’s home stretch has a slight return to those Rabelaisian blasts: Death Kink recalls that a key early Fontaines influence was Nirvana, the sardonic later version, keen to subvert and disrupt and slip “meretricious” into a pop lyric. The closing Favourite, meanwhile, is an unselfconscious love buzz that addresses one of alt-rock’s favourite counterfactuals: what if The Cure had covered Dinosaur Jr instead of the other way round? “Ah, it makes sense when you understand/The misery made me another marked man,” sings Grian, having all the feelings, all at once.
With Skinty Fia, Conor Deegan told MOJO he’d fulfilled his teenage dream of making three great albums, and so the future was a case of que sera sera. Now the future is here, and it’s alive with possibility. One reason Romance feels so exciting is its affirmation of a renewed creative spirit. On Horseness Is The Whatness, Fontaines D.C. ask: “Will someone find out what the word is that makes the world go round?” Well, ‘love’ may tear us apart, but ‘romance’ is forever.
- Keith Cameron - mojo4music.com
