By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

“He was reading Ulysses to his baby, just for the craic, know what I mean?” – Fontaines D.C, Crack Magazine, June 2024

Fontaines D.C have changed. I, a fond and faithful listener, now find myself being ‘24 raging with desire’ more than I am drumming the demands of  ‘my childhood was small but I’m going to be big’,  yet the shatteringly poetic lyrics of melancholia and nostalgia of Fontaines’ continue to stick, with Romance providing the space for Fontaines D.C to morph and experiment. They have grown up, grown out, and continue to marvel. Romance, the highly anticipated soundtrack to my summer, whirls us through Fontaines’ dabble into maturity, journeying us on a quest for understanding. The Joycian echoes in their lyricism and dynamism are still heard behind the deafening ridiculousness of their new look; their sound encapsulates a Joycian manifesto of vast, violent living. 

Pressing play on Romance, the title track greets us with an eerie smile. The swirling soundscape, introducing us to this album’s more shoegaze influences, with a dripping bassline provides a perfect preface to the question at the heart of the track and the album; ‘maybe romance is a place?’. Fontaines’ image has been cemented in the Dublin city sky that hangs over so many of their songs, providing the Irish music scene with the recognition it deserves. Fontaines’ brash portrayal of 21st century Irish life is not romantic, but nostalgic, inviting all of us to feel the love, rage, and confusion. The foreign familiarity about the place is striking even to non-Dubliners. Joyce’s Dubliners is just as much much an outcry to the realities of Ireland as it is a voyeuristic love letter to the people that make the city; Fontaines have taken this manifesto to heart, with Romance dissecting the unromantic romance of life as well as celebrating the fleeting tenderness that makes it, whilst also taking us on a Ulysses-esq journey of all encapsulating and awe enrapturing discovery. 

Just as Joyce felt it was easier to write about Ireland whilst in Paris, Fontaines’ love letters home only grew stronger and nuanced from the NW postcodes where Romance was penned. Indeed, the album art itself embodies this confused billet-doux. On the one hand, the familiar typeface of Skinty Fia has remained – the gothic brutality searing the surface identity of the LP, yet the abrasively virulent crying love heart in their album art is striking against the sombre tones of its predecessors; a confused attempt at a salient move to a distinct future. Whilst Ireland becomes the ghost at the feast of Romance, hauntingly visible whilst never fully materialising, you can tell that the new bounds of the band’s relationship to their homeland have influenced the introspection that takes place. It is no wonder then that Joyce appears so lucidly within their lyrics as they have moved from Dublin, in the obvious homages to him in the titles of “Bloomsday” (Skinty Fia) and “Horseness Is The Whatness” – ensuring an oblation is taken to the man who has inspired them so profoundly. If ‘romance is a place’, the band journeys in search of discovering it through the album – defying the anger of exclusion in “Here’s the Thing”, and truly modernist disillusionment of “In the Modern World”. Neither Ireland, Britain, or liminally vast geography of touring are the place, yet through the drawn out quest that Romance is we perhaps come closer to finding this place is not in fact an island unto ourselves, but just ourselves in general. 

The threatening epic of Ulysses gathers its foreboding from its microscopic atomisation of the human experience, which Joyce further complicates by distilling all that makes us tick into the course of a day. As Mr. Bloom relishes in the idea of  “watch[ing]it all the way down, swallow a pin sometime come out of the ribs years after, tour round the body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric juice coils of intestines like pipes”, fascinating in the idea of  introspection he, and we, find ourselves submitting to, so do these boys in the better land. They crudely dissect all the stages, nuances, and apparitions of romance. The crashing optimism of “Favourite”, with its happy-go-lucky swooning towards a more comfortable future, is complicated by the tragedy of “were”; “you were my favourite, for a while”. The simple sunniness of the track is blasted, forcing us to reconsider how we feel about the way things once “were”, but ultimately providing us with musical satisfaction in spite of the seeming incongruity of sound and song. Fontaines take us into the “coils of intestines” of how we perceive romance, before, during, after, as younger iterations of ourselves or elder, showcasing all of romance’s murky innards. 

The punching tone of “Starburster” has been compared to that of a panic attack. Brutal. Uncompromising. Strange. Divinely crushing and incoherent with the rest of the album. To start an album this way takes guts, which Fontaines proceed to lay on a platter for us. This intangible battlecry is reminiscent of the bizarreness and brazen of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses. What being ‘the pig on the Chinese calendar’ and J. D. Salinger has to do with any of this, I am yet to understand, but, what is remarkable, and a testimony to the extent of the Joycien stains on their work, is that it doesn’t have to be understood to make sense. “Bug”’s cinematic manipulation of voices, ramifies this idea further; the layering voices and production of the track excite me with each listen, and yet I am never entirely too sure who is saying what or why. Ulysses and “Starburster” aren’t nonsense, nor do they come to us with exacting meaning.

A friend’s take on Romance, that is echoed by many long-time fans, is that Fontaines’ new look is “vanilla piss” and startlingly obvious that “they haven’t dressed themselves”; the grimey stench and detachment of old has been diluted for market. Whilst the rage of  Fontaines’ juvenilia only appears as subtly secret as a lingering childhood habit in Romance, and the noxious colours of Romance would make Dogrel hurl – the bizarreness of this look, the distorted future it encapsulates echos those Joycian flecks within their being. Appearing to us now as emotionally-complex aliens from some far flung lightyear, adorned in quasi-Harajuku armour, they, like Joyce, appear both overwhelmed and anticipatory of the future – relishing in the fuzzy terms of being Irish and out of Ireland whilst pushing 30, whilst watching their world descend to an unpredictably fast chaos through their patchwork sound and style. The lunacy and journey of Romance is by no means over, and marks a new start for Fontaines, one which, like Joyce, may take retrospection to fully appreciate.  

Maybe Romance Was a Place? Fontaines D.C.’s Fourth Best

By Harry Laventure

Midnight (sg.): the 23rd August opens in E-minor. On my knees by the end of the working week, I have stayed up to catch a glimmer of the sun rising on the Irish five-piece’s latest album. It is now a biennial tradition, after all, and I am yet to be left dissatisfied by this particular love affair. Chatten and co have made belligerent fragments of my everyday’s glittering discoveries since the Mercury awards of 2019, and the raving colossus of Dogrel. The guitar-barking menace of this stout-smudged elocution still stains my approach to contemporary music like a crackhead at the blinds. Had modern wrath ever enjoyed such lyrical swagger? Between the indignant passages of T.S. Eliot and old Irish trad’s intrusions on a distortion pedal, to think otherwise would have been a sinful proposal to my nostalgia-ridden catalogue. 

As the second child, A Hero’s Death (2020) seemed inconsistent in its oscillations, but had the polarities of the dynamic down to a tee. Tracks like “A Lucid Dream” and “Televised Mind” roared symmetric to their ancestors in “Hurricane Laughter” and “Too Real”. The whimsically touching “Oh Such a Spring” and wounded consolation of “No” provided more tender hues to their earthy discography. Skinty Fia (2022) secured the band Best International Group at the Brits. A glorious collection of hits and tremors, the listener could not help but shudder at the undertones of the Irish diaspora both in the searingly vague (“I Love You”) and the hyper-personal (“The Couple Across the Way”). We felt here a movement away from the amelodious dirges of their crucible years, and a new conviction in worldview: the dead-eyed grunts of a group still in disillusionment’s grapnels whilst occupying new landscapes. And how it suited them. To say that I saw them on this tour would be a gross underestimation of the tangible effects that their music can have live. The gravity of it tests the mettle of a man’s range, physical and emotional. By the end, we were all of us bent to the shape of a gaping mouth: their sorrows were ours, our screams were theirs. 

All the while, the band had stayed true to their pretences. Their interviews continued to be laced with a strain of awkwardness preserved for the alienated of an inside joke, only just balanced by a self-effacing aridity of ego. Musically, the instrumentation of the group had never lost an authenticity in its elemental, deceptively simple composites. There were no attempts to disguise the raw with the motley. That is not to say that they were without improvement. Whilst lodestars maintained their shade, the stark gape between the violent texture of a track like “Nabokov” and the thinner thuds of “The Lotts” played exhibition to the innovation that certain artists are capable of in the desperate terror of stagnation. Within, we continued to be granted lyrical sapphires like

See the handsome mourners crying

They hawked a beating heart for a sturdy spine, yeah

What good is happiness to me 

If I’ve to wield it carefully?

That was off the lead single “Jackie Down the Line”, for goodness’ sake. This is a band that met at poetry club, after all. 

Chatten’s solo project Chaos for the Fly (2023) seemed a healthy exercise for him. It felt like a malady 0f the heart that had to be sweated out and wrestled with introspectively. The result was a constellation of ballads with disarmingly touching lyrics, at no detriment to or detraction from the wider band’s identity. And so we waited in the wake thereof with baited breath. 

This all being said, I do not think that I was ever permitted true excitement for Romance from a couple of days after its Kubrickian announcement. I so desired it to be a success, but certain symptoms preyed upon my English scepticism. The much talked about cyber-punk look marked a consolidated effort to change their appearance in line with the new sounds they were generating. Uh oh. “Our personality is bigger than the sound that we make”, Chatten pronounced to NME a few moments after Glastonbury. I then read that they had hired James Ford as producer, the man who took Arctic Monkeys from Humbug to AM with the new sartorial armada of leather jackets, aviators, and quiffs. Alarmed, yes, but not enough to render my impressionability hardened.

Indeed, none of this stopped me from listening to each of the four preceding singles within seconds of release. “Starburster” was a delicious new flavour; a rhythmic version of scattered thoughts; an aggressive insincerity somewhere between early Kasabian and Spear of Destiny – from the kind of ‘enlightened’ madman you wouldn’t want to get onto the train when there is only a spare seat next to you. It was a smug wink into the void – the sort of music Camus may have enjoyed. “Favourite” was peculiarly but deliberately familiar. Not very complicated in sonic or lyrical terms, it felt like an early Cure or Felt track had bonked one of the very first Fontaines singles. There was something logically and cyclically pleasing about this: as the boys remarked themselves, if “Starburster” is where they want to go, “Favourite” is where they have come from. Melancholic but exuberant, it is a good pop song from a band who had never confused the simple with the condescending. We now had the second and the final tracks of the upcoming album. 

I must speak plainly here. “Here’s the Thing” flies entirely in the face of that last compliment I just paid. An utter aberration to the ears, by their standards. This is an important concession – any sense of disappointment in this review comes only as second fiddle to my high expectations and hero worship of the band until now. Described as their soundtrack to an imagined anime car chase, it is ludicrously conceited to claim that it is a song “that twists and turns in what it wants, back and forth between pain and numbness” as Chatten has. Cliché lyrics meet cliché chords, and a decent guitar riff is juiced for a melody that seems calculated in its catchiness. As for the call and response panting which forms the backhand of the verses, I have more disgust than the sum of every other gripe of mine in the discography. The gasp in “Starburster” works like the straggled breath of air from a drowning man. Pardon my ugliness in expression, but given the lazy narcissism of the song’s structure, progressions, and lyrics, I can only conclude that this is the musical version of loving oneself – it sounds like it too. 

Hearing this entirely destabilised my hopes and expectations for the album. I sincerely believe it is their worst song on there by a long way, maybe ever – beyond the pop of it, I cannot fathom why it was picked as a single. “In the Modern World” was a far better fourth, only two days before Romance’s release. I confess, I’d watched live versions of this beforehand. The slightly predictable chords are eclipsed entirely by the profundity of the instrumentation’s atmosphere (not just because there are strings) and Chatten’s confessions. The war-like drums and Spaghetti Western guitar riffs harmonise with the eternal standoff between the delicate rhetoric of a relationship’s intimate rationale and the callousness of our conditions. This is Romance in its essential form. 

Given the length of this proem, it is perhaps time that the ring composition concluded. There I lay, 00:41. The following are my bullet point thoughts on the rest of the album. 

  T1: Romance

The creeping Leviathan. Sinister as an imp’s carousel (conf. ‘Bob’s Casino’, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare). It’s arguable that the harmony and wanderlust of maybe romance is a place is the best bloom on the album. Perfect opener, on recording and live. 

T2: Starburster (above)

T3: Here’s The Thing (not worth another word)

T4: Desire

Sincerely interesting arrangement until ‘Big Shot’ riff was recycled. Breakout has strong flavours of shoegaze, Deftones/NewDad. An invitation for the participation of larger crowds. Large chorus.

T5: In The Modern World (above)

T6: Bug

Cheesy jangle pop that hasn’t much shine. Instrumentation similar to an early Morrissey track (pale imitation of The Smiths’); slightly corny melody meets lyrics like Now I’m higher than anyone here/And that ain’t nothing on me. Maybe I’ve missed the point.

T7: Motorcycle Boy

A song superior to its title. Vocal sample not unlike something from their creative hero’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. An otherwise stripped-down arrangement only enhances strong vocals and lyrics. Relentless strum turns the anxiety into a rhythm that outruns the relationship lamented. 

T8: Sundowner

Recycled ‘Jackie Down The Line’ on bass. Sounds like a drug montage by someone who has never taken drugs. Vaguely apocalyptic lyrics. Tame Impala-esque. Maybe better as a cover. 

T9: Horseness Is The Whatness

Once more, a lullaby introduction almost identical to Lamar’s ‘Father Time’. Proof that quoting a literary great does not instil the same calibre by default, it still comes of age from innocence and plods in a pretty way. 

T10: Death Kink

Absolutely raucous. Back to basics in their ragged brilliance. 6/4, no less. Self-destruction and rage cling to Chatten’s voice, indignant to all. Walls of sound like bruised skies (conf. Bacon’s Pope Innocent X) reliant on no wizardry of production. A solo that struts. I’d kill to hear it live. A whole life meretricious, you shattered. Fitting for a number of listeners sonically and philosophically. 

T11: Favourite (above)

For the first time since its writing, I revisited this piece today. Alas, my thoughts haven’t changed. 

 

By Roemer Lips

Friday afternoon. I was itching to get out of my political science lecture. The subject was Clifford Geertz, a central figure in the understanding of anthropology as an interpretive science, who argued that analysis of culture should be focused on meaning, not law. As thrilling as this may sound – especially when explained in French – I was having difficulty concentrating. Red Star was on my mind. 

When one thinks of football in France, Paris might not be the first city that springs to mind. Marseille has the European pedigree, and the fervent support that strikes fear and wonder in equal measure. Lyon had the seven consecutive titles in the naughties, with a cult classic team of Juninho, Malouda, Ben Arfa and Benzema. Fans of a certain vintage may even remember the flair of Saint-Etienne in the 1970s and 80s, with mavericks such as Platini, Rocheteau and Rep. Of course, the humongous, Qatari-backed elephant in the room is Paris Saint-Germain, undoubtedly France’s most popular club. However, it reeks of inauthenticity, from its spontaneous 1970 birth to its limitless financial power, which actually makes one wonder how they don’t win the league every single year, or how European success still evades them. Supporting a football club is all about a sense of belonging; a fan should feel recognised as a valuable part of the collective, not just as a customer. A club with the riches of PSG can afford to completely disregard its fanbase, and even well-intended efforts to forge a proper culture come across as disingenuous. The opposite can be said of Red Star FC, who’s supporter culture is one of the richest in world football. 

From its foundation in 1897, Red Star was destined to be a left-wing, antifascist club. While its name supposedly derives from a cross-channel ferry service, its connotations with the political leanings of the club’s fanbase are unavoidable. Whether this political stance was somehow inspired by the revolutionary potential of the club’s name is unclear, however the two complement each other perfectly. 

Having fulfilled my academic commitments, I met with a similarly football fascinated friend and we boarded the metro, hurtling towards Saint-Ouen, just north of the city. At the bar L’Olympic just opposite the stadium, supporters spilled onto the street, beer in one hand and cigarette in the other. Go to any pub next to an English football ground before kick-off and the place would be a chaotic mess of half-drunk fans singing. The Red Star supporters hardly made any noise at all, quietly chatting amongst themselves. The majority were only identifiable by the green and white scarves draped elegantly around their necks. It became clear to me that this was the club of choice for the moustachioed, bicycle-riding, painter jacket-wearing Parisian, of which there is no shortage. Reducing the fanbase to this, however, would be a mistake. The importance of Red Star to its local community is immediately clear when you walk around Saint-Ouen. Children wear replica shirts, and the walls of kebab shops are lined with green and white scarves. Not a PSG logo in sight; a proper community club.

Soon, darkness descended and the Stade Bauer’s floodlights began to glow. There was a football match to be played. We finished our beers, filed into the ground, bought another pint (the opportunity to have a beer in the stands was too appealing for two English football fans), and assumed our seats right next to the standing section full of ultras. The stadium is currently under construction, and therefore only consists of two stands, one along a sideline and another behind one of the goals. It creates a feeling of openness, as the ultras’ drumbeats roll over the low-rise industrial buildings and into the night, carrying with them the fans’ fervour for social change. 

The opponent that night was Caen, who brought with them no more than 200 fans, tucked away into the corner of the stand behind the goal. Waving their Normandy flags, they fervently supported their players, likely relishing the opportunity to get one over the Parisians. To put it bluntly, the standard of football, even considering that this was a second division match, was subpar. Simple passes were repeatedly misplaced by both sides and neither team played with any real intensity. Red Star were especially lacklustre and conceded two before half-time. The groans from the main stand at each goal were palpable; one got the sense of a familiar story unfolding before the fans’ eyes. The second half, however, was wildly different. Red Star took to the field with a renewed sense of urgency, and quickly scored two of their own, including an outrageous lob from the centre forward with his back to goal. Both goals were treated with an explosion of joy from the main stand – a level of passion that I had not seen from most Red Star fans up to that point. Considering the club’s countercultural tendencies, one would be forgiven for expecting many fans to be muted in their support, almost too cool to care about the club’s on pitch results. Red Star, though, belongs to the combatant revolutionary foot soldier and not the high-brow political thinker. The fighting spirit of the club lives in every supporter and is unleashed when Red Star scores. While it is true that the club stands for more than just football, this absolutely does not mean that the football doesn’t matter. The football matters as much, if not more, because it represents a set of values that the fans deeply care about.

Alongside its political reputation, Red Star is a cool club. Recent collaborations with VICE and Highsnobiety will tell you that. Their Instagram feed is aesthetically more pleasing than most, while their website is clean and modern. However, the problem with being cool is that the moment too many people start recognising that you are cool you risk losing the very thing that made you cool in the first place. Red Star’s countercultural standing, its simplistic, bold logo, and its location were what made it – for lack of a better word – cool. It is the perfect club for fans blinded by the increasingly bright lights of PSG. I consider myself among this group. Football, though, is business, and Red Star need to be careful to avoid selling out. Replica shirts are currently priced at eighty-five euros, which is a concerning omen. More worrying is the club’s ownership, which since 2022 has been the American investment firm 777 Partners. As you’d expect, Red Star fans were initially sceptical of this, and unfortunately they were right to be, as 777 recently found itself in a major fraud case and is in the process of selling all its football clubs. The future of Red Star therefore hangs in the balance. Of course, the fans still make their views clear with songs and banners; there is however a serious danger of a disconnect emerging between the club and its supporters, as is the general trend across the football world. Red Star’s soul, though, will remain with the fans, and no amount of American money can rob them of that. For now, at least, it still has that old-school community spirit that makes the matchday experience so unique. 

The analysis of culture should be interpretative, focused on meaning. Culture in a footballing context is a product of history and myth, which informs the songs supporters sing, the colours they wear and the heroes they invoke. It hangs in the atmosphere, away from the pitch and the directors’ box and is much easier felt than explained. Red Star then is full of culture, full of meaning to its supporters. By committing yourself to the club, you are partaking in a history of left-wing, anti-establishment struggle going back to 1896. Other clubs try to replicate that level of romanticism, Red Star just has it. Indeed, I felt spellbound when on the metro home, with my newly bought scarf around my neck. Football has the magical ability to capture you, and in the Stade Bauer this magic is ubiquitous. Whatever the future holds, Red Star has a fan for life. 

By Tilly Bridgeman

‘It has been the site of wild parties and scandalous liaisons, of creative breakthroughs and marital breakdowns, of one-night stands and days-long parties, of famous triumphs and untimely deaths.’ The Castle on Sunset, Shawn Levy.

The year 2020 saw major punctures made to physical spaces of creativity, with communities being fragmented by lockdowns and individuals seen only as a mass of blue masks marching in search of loo roll. Over the past four years, the deflation of creative endroits has persisted, with online artistic engagement superseding escapades to the cinema, art galleries, opera house – the list goes on.

Yet, a Richter scale ticks on the outskirts of Hollywood’s hills, picking up pulses of creativity coming from a neon red sign and a grey slate roof. ‘The grande dame of Sunset Boulevard’, it named itself in a recent Instagram post; over the course of nearly 100 years, Chateau Marmont has become the space for creativity.

If pressure makes diamonds, then it is a similar sense of tension, so evident in Shawn Levy’s lines taken from The Castle on Sunset, that generates the glinting artistic pieces conceived at the Chateau. The debauched and the intimate, the striking and the simple, the chic and the shabby; contrast defines Chateau Marmont, and it is at this strange intersection of opposing forces that a space of innovation emerges. This seedy wonderland was where photographer Helmut Newton captured Michelle Pfeiffer for Vogue, and was himself caught in a tragic car accident twenty years later. It is the castle in which the young and in love Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski moved to, after their wedding in 1968, yet also where Polanski, alone, would spend his last night in the US following his wife’s murder in 1969. It was at once a hideaway for Nicholas Ray, affected by an incident involving his son and second wife, and the fertile ground from which grew his Rebel Without a Cause. 

Contradiction, right down to the Chateau’s architecture – mid century suites set against an imposing turret – paves the way for artistic upheaval. In conjunction with this permeating sense of incongruity is Chateau Marmont’s ability to amass a vast array of individuals, generating a kind of “safe space” for creativity. Congregation seems to be an apt word, a congregation of thoughts, of personalities, of arts. The Chateau lit the flames of Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll’s nearly decade long affair during their filming of Paris Blues. In 1938, Humphrey Bogart welcomed his mother into one of the suites. More recently, Jay Z and Béyonce ordered the conversion of the garage into a one-time casino for their 2019 Oscars after party. Romantic pursuits, family gatherings, friends (and enemies) all exist in this sphere of imaginative conception. 

Would Shakespeare have found himself at the Chateau? I am not too sure, but I will use his lines from Romeo and Juliet to conclude my point. ‘What’s in a name?’, well, in the case of Chateau Marmont, perhaps everything. Architect Arnold A. Weitzman, in the 1920s, was commissioned by owner Fred Horowitz to build something along the lines of the Chateau d’Amboise, a former cache for French royalty. Yet, when it came to christening the castle, “Chateau Hollywood” was rejected, and in its place the smaller Marmont Lane stood. A chateau and a roadside hotel, where the regal collides with the sordid, and the minds of ninety vibrant years have met and continue to meet.

And so, while Gore Vidal drapes Myra Breckinridge over one of the loungers by the pool and John Belushi fiddles with needles in his bungalow, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele takes the mascot of Pan and his pipe on a stroll down the runway, and Sofia Coppola pushes Stephen Dorff out of the door and into Somewhere, the light of creativity on this Sunset Boulevard Chateau never seems to set. 

By Maisie Jennings

Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault. 

Laura Palmer’s body is found on the shore: blue-mouthed, blue-eyed, blonde. Her naked corpse is shrouded in plastic, as if gift-wrapped for the male gaze. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult classic television series Twin Peaks (1991) is distinct in its strangeness. What begins as a fairly conventional whodunit is stretched and contorted by dream visions, interdimensional spirits, and the imposition of the supernatural onto seedy, corporeal, small-town America. The charming and unusual narrative structure is characteristic of Lynch, the surrealist auteur. Overlooked, however, is his remarkable use of female victimhood – identifying Twin Peaks and his wider cinematic oeuvre as a lexicon of male violence. 

The elusive nature of Twin Peaks’ plot does not obscure the fact that it hinges entirely upon the debasement and death of a teenage girl. Aligning with classic Lynchian themes, gender-based violence is the evil used to untangle darker threads enmeshed within kitschy Americana. In Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer is homecoming-queen-turned-perfect-dead-girl, and her murder investigation, led by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman, unveils the town’s criminal underbelly. The post-mortem shattering of her ‘good girl’ image reveals Laura’s secret life as a cocaine addict and teenage sex worker. 

On one hand, I think Lynch and Frost attempt to critique white masculine hegemonic power: the town’s most important male figures are implicated within the sex and drug trafficking ring that underpins Twin Peaks’ business and industry. On the other hand, it can be argued that the discovery of Laura’s secret diary and the scandalous revelations that fester, or flirt with, in some ways, a moral justification of her death. Her tragic abuse, exploitation, criminal connections, and drug use essentially groom her for this inevitable, logical end. Moreover, her death catalyses a grander, metaphysical battle between forces of good and evil; though she haunts the original series’ narrative in all her pain and beauty, the significance of her death becomes markedly less focused on her own suffering. Nevertheless, Laura’s murder is unequivocally propagated by the patriarchal structures and male dominance that constitute Twin Peaks. In Episode Four, Laura’s funeral is interrupted by her ex-boyfriend, Bobby Briggs – “All you ‘good’ people – you wanna know who killed Laura? You did! We all did…”. 

During the course of the series, it is revealed that Laura was killed by her father, Leland, who had been possessed by an evil spirit named BOB. Leland, while possessed by BOB, had also subjected Laura to years of sexual abuse. BOB, I think, is best understood as a symbolic representation of earthly male violence, rather than a demonic, supernatural entity. In the series, whether BOB is real or not is debated by Cooper and Truman; they decide, however, that he is “the evil that men do”. I believe this statement explicitly refers to how men hurt women, rather than a wider meditation on humanity’s primordial capacity for evil. The terrible violence enacted by BOB belongs far more tangibly in the world of Twin Peaks, than the mythologised Black Lodge: the extra-dimensional stem of all evil and darkness. 

Like Laura, virtually all the other female characters in Twin Peaks are subject to male violence. It occurs so frequently and so intensely, yet it seems to function as little more than a thematic device or motif. In the very first episode, simultaneous with Laura’s murder, the character Ronette Pulaski is beaten and raped with such brutality that it leaves her comatose – after a few episodes, she is omitted from the plot. Although the 1992 feature film and prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me clarifies the violent details of her death, its significance is presented as purely incidental, making the investigation of Laura’s murder a federal case, and prompting the arrival of Cooper. 

The treatment of gender-based violence in Twin Peaks demonstrates a troubling dichotomy. Male violence appears as an integral theme, but the female suffering and trauma that pervades the series is seemingly subsumed by larger points about corruption and morality. It is this latter theme in which Lynch and Frost invest heavily through the antidotes of white masculinity and ‘good’ male characters. When Audrey Horne, the daughter of business magnate and brothel owner Ben Horne, is captured whilst undercover as a teenage prostitute, the series is quick to brush over her drugging and assault: instead, she is used to demonstrate the overwhelming goodness of her male rescuers. Indeed, Audrey’s character is constantly fetishised by a voyeuristic, sexualised gaze. The surveillance of her age, allure, and purity as an 18 year old schoolgirl more or less reduces her to “jailbait” – the forbidden object of Cooper’s desires. 

I’d like to further problematise the depictions of sex work and exploited women in Twin Peaks through the character of Josie Packard, the only woman of colour presented as a main character in the series. As the narrative progresses, it transpires that Josie, the widow of wealthy mill owner Andrew Packard, had been involved in prostitution, gang warfare, and prostitution in Hong Kong (she is also revealed to have orchestrated her husband’s fatal boat accident). Josie embodies the racialised fetishisation of East Asian women, in particular the stereotypical ‘dragon lady’ – an alluring mistress of deceit and deception. Demonstrative of Lynch and Frost’s unforgiving attitude towards sex work, Josie’s death in the second season seems to act as a suitable punishment for her crimes. 
Twin Peaks is indicative of wider examples of how male violence and female subjugation is used across David Lynch’s filmography. Blue Velvet (1986) is focused on a masochistic female sex worker and her various assaults and entrapments, a foil to the innocent high-school love interest of Kyle MacLachlan’s protagonist. Wild at Heart (1990) features the rape of another female character. There is the femme fatale of Lost Highway (1997). Even Lynch’s adaptation of Dune (1984) portrays femininity as a destabilising force. Although, in classic Lynchian fashion, there is thematic significance to his use of gender-based violence, there are enduring problematic aspects found in his ceaselessly brutalised female characters.

By Jack Fry

On my final evening in New York, I surfaced from Broadway subway station into the sticky humidity of a summer night in the city and walked the 200 or so yards to Clockwork bar, the archetype of an American dive bar. Having just swerved around a recurring character from “BRAT Summer,” Addison Rae, on the street, wearing a sparkly pink vest and flip-flops and sipping from a straw, I entered and ordered a Budweiser and a well shot of tequila. The bar was unassuming and poorly lit with walls painted black and graffiti scrawled across any and every surface and the speakers blasted the kind of music that you might find on an “indie sleaze” Spotify playlist. My plans for the night consisted of catching a set from two buzzy NYC artists who would most likely feature on said playlist; The Dare at a bar round the corner and Been Stellar at their album release show over in Brooklyn. Two artists who, if you are fan of Lena Dunham’s Girls, could very well have played at the Bushwick party in the episode ‘the crackcident’. After drinks, I joined a group of NYU students who I’d shared a cigarette with to head to Home Sweet Home where The Dare has accrued a cult following for his DJ sets that he of course calls “freakquencies”. 

The Dare, aka Harrison Patrick Smith, is a DJ and producer who emerged post-pandemic out of a supposed downtown scene that centred around so-called “Dimes Square” in Chinatown. You most likely recognise him from the Charli xcx and Billie Eilish remix of ‘Guess’. He has cultivated an image that is both striking and immediately recognisable: a uniform of a skinny Celine suit, sharp mod cut and dark wayfarers all worn with a careless affectation a la Bret Easton Ellis. The character created by The Dare is a nihilistic, horny, self obsessed, drug taking 20 something who lives to party – a kind of modern-day Dionysus. The music and his persona are as brazenly sex obsessed as Tom Ford-era Gucci (G shaped pubic hair and all). He is obsessed with both who he desires (everyone) and being desired. Consequently, much of the lyrical content could have been drawn from Superbad film dialogue. He has resuscitated polarising sonic influences from the electroclash era and injected a smuttiness. Thus his music was bound to be marmite and this is as he intends. He recently stated to the New York Times: “I just like music that rubs people one way or the other”.

The Dare’s music draws unquestionable inspiration from New York’s music of the noughties. His music is a pastiche of bands and projects such as The Rapture, Fischerspooner and LCD SoundSystem, mixing electronic dance music with indie rock and sing shout vocals. On his new album What’s wrong with New York? The Dare brings together his host of influences to make an evocative party record that is both intoxicating and jarring. Whilst electroclash is often cited as a reference point, I’m reminded of the dance and pop music that emerged in the early 2010s. His music, lyrically, is a parody of a lot of recession era pop. Think Ke$ha – when pop music was wholly concerned with “tonight” and the charged mythical promise that it held. The obsession with hedonism in pop music, while not new, was perhaps exacerbated post-financial crash as a form of escapism for Millennials. For Gen Z, the popularity of The Dare’s club-centred music and its inane lyrical content may stem from a similarly cynical mindset. For a generation that has grown up amid the existential threats of climate change and a global pandemic, the attraction to a narcissistic and fatalist debauchery seems apt.

The Dare’s remarkable production ability and DIY attitude have created a characteristic sound where synths resemble computer game samples, beats feel like those of preprogrammed keyboard tracks and his basses sound as if they are buzzing through a blown out speaker. On Perfume the chorus in both cadence and crudeness is reminiscent of ‘I’m too sexy’ by Right Said Fred and LMFAO’s 2010 hit ‘I’m sexy and I know it’. ‘You’re Invited’ invokes the funk warped cyber vocals of Chromeo and the hook in the bridge sounds uncannily like the Duck Sauce hit, ‘Barbara Streisand’. ‘All night’s’ production calls to mind ‘love in stereo’ a track from another indie sleaze icon Sky Ferreira. However, it’s not just electroclash and recession pop he’s drawing from; he is also combining the brash beats of on trend pc pop with the twinkly synths of the eighties.

His set at Freakquencies was filled with a large chunk of people who were probably using fake IDs to get in. The dance floor, although small, was packed with sweaty people jostling under the shattered glare of a disco ball and on the tables of the neighbouring booths. Despite the optics, it all felt rather affected or tame – almost like an attempt at recapturing the reckless abandon of previous generations, a parody of itself. There was a poise that British crowds tend to lack. Maybe it was too early on in the night but everyone seemed, like The Dare, aware and careful of how they appeared. It was almost like they expected to end up on Cobra Snake’s website the next day, caught wide eyed in the white flash, a Cory Kennedy look alike. I left after an hour but not because his set was lacklustre. Criminally, the bar didn’t have a smoking area and they refused re-entry if you stepped outside for a smoke. Much like the man we’d come to see, the scene is a projection, yet evidently it emits a rather seductive light. As I wandered to the subway I passed nearly two blocks worth of people still queuing to get in.

As I waited for the train, rats ran across the tracks strewn with detritus: a Mexican coke bottle, a watermelon vape, a shredded gig poster. I took the J train, rattling across the Williamsburg bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn, peeking at the skyline through the iron lattice. I walked under the screeching tracks until I reached Baby’s All Right where the pink glow of its neon sign illuminated the gathering crowd outside. I had arrived at the release gig for Scream from New York, the debut album by Been Stellar—a quintet from NYU and the latest group to attempt a rock revival in New York. Having already played storied venues like the Mercury Lounge and been on the cover of the NME, this attempt seems to be genuinely promising. 

Been Stellar clearly draws from the same time period as The Dare although they’re reaching into a different bag of sonic influences. Their rock harks back to both the garage era of the Strokes, incorporating shoegaze-y walls of noise, while the production of certain tracks is reminiscent of the post punk of Fontaine’s DC and their debut album Dogrel. Their music, coincidentally produced by the Irish band’s frequent collaborator, Dan Carey, has a fuzzy and gravelly texture that recreates the inescapable white noise of city traffic and construction. This dissonant wash of sound, coupled with a gnawing delivery by slocum in his at times Lou Reed like nasal drawl, gives the music an evocative sense of place. Every so often, however, the distinctiveness between tracks is lost in the slowed tempo guitar noise which drowns out the lyrics and melodies. 

Much like the bands who emerged in post 9/11 New York, Been Stellar have evolved out of their own generational defining crisis and in their songs they vividly portray images of mid and post pandemic in the city. On the titular track with a sound that is reaching for the anthemic, they attempt to tackle a subject beyond Manhattan itself seeking to capture a national mood. Frontman, Sam Slocum sings “It’s the end of the world and I feel fine” embodying a generation, who have become so accustomed to crisis they’ve grown apathetic to it “the people didn’t make a sound”. And so whilst he sings “I just don’t have the words they don’t make words for this” the music begins to take over for them. The guitars ring out like sirens, nervy and unavoidable, as if, through sheer force of vibration they could, at the very least, make you physically feel something. Crack the glass and break through the numbness and malaise.

Whilst The Dare is disinterested and that’s part of his charm, Been Stellar plays with a fervour and earnestness that lurks behind the former’s bravado. Amongst statements as expansive as the title track are moments that divulge a longing for intimacy. The band writes of the miscommunications and confusion that can characterise youthful romance across the album on tracks such as ‘Takedown’, ‘Pumpkin’ and album highlight ‘Sweet’. On ‘Sweet’, a song reminiscent of ‘The Rat’ by The Walkmen in its urgency of feeling (not a comparison that I make lightly), they also demonstrate a knack for an emotionally potent couplet: “It won’t always be this way, I know the tide.” 

Both Been Stellar and The Dare namecheck New York in their album titles and they are also both making music with an inherent identity drawing from the city’s artists that have come before. For a band who titled their EP Manhattan Youth and had a song on it called ‘Kids 1995’ after the cult classic harmony Corine film, it’s clear that Been Stellar is set on capturing the spirit of New York for a generation obsessed with the past. By invoking these influences, they are blatantly wishing to become a part of the city’s musical canon. On ‘Manhattan youth’, an early single, Slocum sings of his peer group who are “certain of something stuck in the new” nostalgically longing for a bygone era. Perhaps Gen Z’s retrospection is borne out of our complete access to past culture in the age of the internet or maybe we have sought out the era of our childhood as a balm for the prospect of the present and the uncertain future. However, the trouble with indie sleaze or attempts to recreate it by Gen Z is that it never existed in the first place, it is a manifestation of a dream world, a self mythologised (see ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’) golden age of a scene that was arguably created in retrospect. 
Furthermore, can good taste and a sum of influences become something equal to or greater than those things being referenced, a true original? As The Dare writes on his album closer, with a winking self awareness, “sometimes I steal what others wrote”. However, despite these objections and as derivative as some of the sonic and the lyrical themes for both acts are, they are also tapping into a timelessness. Every youthful cohort has felt like this in their 20s, directionless, lonely and seeking connection or meaning in the night or a new experience. It’s almost classic. Slocum wails on the album closer “I have the answer just for a little while”. The yearning in his voice embodies the elusive coming of age clarity that we are all in pursuit of. New York has perennially been the place to be in search of this answer; it is an endless well of romanticisation and inspiration. Who can blame a few more twenty-something year-olds (myself included), however naively, for following in this tradition? To reference Hannah Horvath of Girls, Been Stellar and The Dare may not be the voices of a generation but they may well be a voice of a generation.

Cinematic realism in the ‘70s

By Prithvijeet Sinha

For those who have seen 2022’s emotionally wrenching To Leslie, toplined by Andrea Riseborough’s tour de force performance that dares to show the price of an unfulfilled life, the imminent sense of connection with the material owes its debts to the ’70s. With its unobtrusive narrative, resonant treatment of small-town America, and needle drops like Dolly Parton’s Here I Am, there is an obvious harkening to the omnibus of John Cassavetes and Robert Altman. But the credit is due to the film’s director Michael Morris and writer Ryan Binaco for not just imitating the style of naturalistic filmmaking from an era where auteurism delved into the lives of women with rare empathy and psychological unravelling. Rather, it’s their own achievements that make discerning viewers like me cite one of the most prolific periods/decades of filmmaking. As I replay the film in my mind, Andrea’s very visage is so much like Shelley Duvall’s in vintage Altman oeuvre.

Even something as recent as Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters (2024) exercises the same tone where the focus on the claustrophobia of spaces and frayed emotions is reminiscent of the filmmaking ethos that continues to remind this cinephile of its enduring influence when it comes to disseminating realism and truthful characterisations.

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The 1970s, as the advent of the real and true, is an extensive archive where filmmaking reached new heights of authenticity in terms of subject matter and execution in storytelling, extricated from the necessarily diegetic use of music and melodrama, bringing welcome relief to the internalised shades of human endeavours. 

What is particularly empowering to realise is that within the oeuvre of tentpole releases, character development was illustrated by long takes devoted to conversations between key people in the narrative, such as in Jaws (1975), Alien (1979) and even The Exorcist (1973).  Can one possibly forget the dining-room conversation between Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary and Richard Dreyfuss where an interpersonal camaraderie exists to offset the mood of danger that is organically fleshed out by director Steven Spielberg? It’s a long take where smiles and affability, with Lorraine and Dreyfuss’ wit and Scheider’s laconic, reserved charm, stand in contrast to the individual instances in the screenplay where a grieving mother slaps the sheriff (Scheider) for his lack of action – it resounds far more because of the use of pithy words telegraphing her helpless emotional state. Or when Dreyfuss and Scheider are with the formidable shark-catcher Robert Shaw on a boat and their individual stands seamlessly address the pertinence of the issue at hand. There’s no foreboding situational musical cue or acting tick to overdramatise the proceedings. This slow-burning technique is particularly creepy and issues the vulnerability of the cast-members aboard USS Nostromo in Alien. Ridley Scott and his team let sound-effects and the gadgetry of the cavernous spaceship build up levels of tension without resorting to cheap gimmickry or jump scares.

Equally vulnerable are the moments in The Exorcist where a phone call from an absent father, a mother-daughter pair’s intrinsic bonding while the little girl is being put to sleep, or the extended opening sequence where Max Von Sydow’s archaeologist stationed in the Far East finds the heat, atmosphere and the inkling of evil with the discovery of ancient figurines and a sense of alienation, score the brutal underpinning of something invisible that upends normal lives. All three of them hence are not only beneficiaries of the quieter side of filmmaking that helps to divine the fearful in effective ways but ensures that the humanity of their particular domiciles and concerns wrought a moral centre. It is not just about the pursuit against insurmountable odds. It is about the confidence gained by interacting with each other through believable dialogues and colloquialisms of the everyday.

An ubiquitous feature as Carrie (1976) too finds its prom scene and especially the titular protagonist’s savage humiliation soundtracked by an overhead bucket’s movement and then the slow-motion unravelling coinciding with a hall full of laughter. The beeping sound of Carrie’s telekinesis and her mother’s cry of “they’re all gonna laugh at you” repetitively ringing in her head maps her psychological condition in that mortifying moment morphing to terror and mayhem in the annals of cinema.

This freedom of realism made the era’s compact body of work attach itself to the likes of Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972), Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970) and Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt &  Lightfoot (1974) for instance. Three works that are distinct in their respective tonal registers and personal concerns but are able to balance the dramatic and comic elements with finesse precisely because they are not reliant on grand gestures or musical cues to heighten the situation. In their brevity of shots and lucid cinematographic output, they make the interpersonal bonds build authentic tales of the inner fight against racism in the South, a modern interracial community in Harlem, New York and an unusual “bromance” spread out over wide open American country roads respectively. In Sounder especially, the Depression era set story literally finds the humidity, the call of crickets, nondescript Southern homes, and barren patches dictating the characters’ journey. Also pertinent here are the voices of these African-American folks who pine, sing, stay silent and verbally recede when negotiating with racist authorities while talking and behaving in ways true to their socio-economic stations. This leads to the classic scene where Cicely Tyson runs towards Paul Winfield as he makes his way home after a year in prison. It’s the heat, the excited bark of the titular dog and Tyson’s impassioned call of her on-screen partner’s name that packs an emotional wallop for the ages. The sweltering atmosphere and the sounds of the surroundings serve as the soundtrack to this reunion. It’s this same unobtrusive benchmark that makes Tyson’s historic Emmy winning turn in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) one of episodic gravitas and emotional resonance.  Be it in the lakeside scene where a young black man’s speech becomes a source of discomfort for white eavesdroppers or the final stretch where a century old woman walks all the way to a water fountain to mark her evolution in the Civil Rights epoch. It’s just the mouth organ and the facial terrain of resolve that punctuate this outstanding passage in cinematic history sans dialogues or narrative preliminaries.

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Taking stock of non-diegetic use of music, Leonard Cohen’s lilting,  acoustic soundtrack is a haunting presence in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), with its meditative and realistic approach to the frontier using mostly the guitar to strip the Western genre of its grand-standing, epic vision. Take the final scene itself where the acoustic bulwark lends a poignancy to McCabe’s death in freezing snow and Mrs. Miller is physically frozen in an interior space, smoking, their individual tragedies written down in the final anonymity of their stations. Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976) similarly delves into the frontier by casting the legendary likes of Marlon Brando, Harry Dean Stanton and Jack Nicholson. The real triumph here is in letting the action subsist on anticipation and dramatic understatement. Slow burn is the mode of operation in these instances.

This intimacy of interaction between two lonely young females in Three Women (1977) by Altman also designs scenes around both their individual and collective experiences. The atonal soundtrack in some crucial junctures cracks at the deeper tides of this relationship; though it never lets us forget that the lines between social alienation and taking over someone’s personal orbit can become blurred.

This was, after all, the era where boundaries of folk, rock, blues, country, and standard Americana were being readjusted, reframed for posterity, and adapted into malleable forms to inform the soft palettes of Joni Mitchell (her iconic album Blue), James Taylor (on songs like “You’ve Got A Friend”, “Fire and Rain”, “You Can Close Your Eyes”, “Carolina on My Mind”, and “Handy Man”), Roberta Flack (“Killing Me Softly”, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”), Linda Ronstadt (“Heart Like A Wheel”, “Lose Again”, “Blue Bayou”, “Desperado”), The Eagles (“Hotel California”, “Tequila Sunrise”, “Lyin’ Eyes”), and The Carpenters.

Which is why an exemplary documentary feat like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), a tribute to The Band’s swan-song and assortment of the biggest folk-rock artists of the time, feels so timeless in retrospect. It is about being of the moment, bringing one’s unobtrusive camera lens and love for music to a venue and preserving it for future discernment. Today, the film’s legendary status hasn’t dated one bit nor has the pioneering musical imprints of the artists in their ’70s heyday.

If music is the key then Lady Sings the Blues (1972) paints a raw, unerring portrait of the biographical picture where the soft, almost unbearably vulnerable notes of Billie Holiday’s oeuvre are given new life by megastar Diana Ross. The most affecting moments of Billie’s life are defined by music such as when she listens to Bessie Smith on the radio but nothing wipes out the circumstances of her life as an assault by a drunken man or her descent to working in a fallen place as a cleaner. Music is her key and the performances retain their emotive power here. However, the quiet coil and recoil of her trauma, dependency on drugs and mental breakdowns are all traced with the weight of a beleaguered personal history. There’s no music in these scenes, just the raw reflection of hardscrabble truths. This silence is suffocating and primal even as she’s in jail or in the hospital, battling lifelong demons.

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As we shift our gazes towards the era’s films and their relationship with action and reaction, titles like The French Connection, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Straw Dogs and of course Taxi Driver come into our view for how they treat debased corners of  human existence. The iconic car chase in The French Connection (1971) is all about the dogged pursuit of anti-social elements by Gene Hackman’s Popeye but it’s the automobile’s movements through New York City, its skidding tyres and mass of humanity in its way that finds parallels with slimy, dirty abandoned buildings and the subway. The ignominy of violence arising out of locational xenophobia and sexism bursts forth with silent backgrounds and immediacy of action in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), mirroring the final showdown in a fallen hotel in Taxi Driver (1976), the corporeality of it all reflected in the body-horror dynamics of Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1978).  The violence is unerring and the reactions spontaneous because the mid-century axis is relentlessly moving towards a brutal reckoning with the lawlessness of the world in each instance.

A more underrated counterpoint to the supposed action dynamics of a cop saga is found in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1973). Sir Sean Connery’s verbal and mental states inform much of the film’s sense of dread. In it, a bulb in an interrogation room, or a countryside’s dark recesses invoke the loss of humanity that gets into the head of a police officer. The silence boils and tears apart all his defences when faced with a manipulative antagonist.

From Eraserhead‘s (1977) similar invocation of industrial surroundings and ominous sound effects to A Very Natural Thing‘s (1974) subdued investment in the lives of men in love with other men in ’70s New York to the realistic stakes of a divorce in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) down to Iranian classic Chess of the Wind‘s (1976) impressionistic probe into human corruption of the mind, this era mined the subconscious and psychology to blur lines within genres and styles, giving us a body of work that has stood the test of time.

From the melodrama, strings-laden excesses and mostly inert studio sets of the previous decades, the 1970s came out of the woodwork of established norms to settle for unflinching realism. Gone was the necessity of happy endings or cliches. What was begotten was the grammar for not intruding upon individual lives with appendages of sentiment alone, but approaching crises and moral dilemmas with a touch of deeper understanding about the whys and whats of fraying social lines.

Hence I close this article with one of the most definitive images of the era that stands out for me. In Hal Ashby’s seminal Coming Home (1978), the journey of two individuals injured within a California military unit concludes with Tim Buckley’s beautiful ballad “Once I Was”. A montage sequence, the movements of these bodies towards liberation from constrictive ideals and personal freedom is not final but constructs their present as one of individual victory. That is how I see this whole period of cinematic canon as marking the advent of the real and true.

Image credit: online.stereosound.co.jp