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.