Fontaines DC – Romance: Review

‘Romance’ proves to be the creatively richest yet most accessible work Fontaines DC have ever made.

For the last half decade, Fontaines DC have acted like a band you really wanted to get to know better but were content to keep outsiders in the friend zone.

The more you tried to get closer and the more they revealed, the more they remained detached, like someone who spends a date with you outside, staring at their phone.

Through persistence or otherwise though, the time has come. “Maybe romance is a place,” sings Grian Chatten on the title-track, referencing their version, not the icky ‘let’s get each other names tatted’ pits so relished by owners of card shops and Air B&Bs everywhere.

To nobody’s surprise, this construct draws inspiration from a complicated space, a tableau realised against the kind of millennial doomerism articulated by Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s anime Akira and the environmentally anxious fiction of Nikolaj Schultz’s Land Sickness. A scrolling backdrop, it seeds the creatively richest yet most accessible work Fontaines DC have ever made.

In an idiosyncratic tell, Chatten has said that this new roving confidence is due to finally being comfortable with the sound of his own voice, but the experience of making his solo album Chaos For The Fly, with its more intricate arrangements and complex instrumental layering, also bled through directly, and in part explains why producer-du-jour James Ford was hired to ensure that the band’s co-operative writing approach didn’t lead to muddled thinking.

This bending away from their early post-punk roots is now as pronounced as, for example, the gap between the Arctic Monkeys’ AM and The Car.

On Starburster, Chatten, to a crashing break, decayed strings and elfin piano, cuts through with stentorian rhyming, pausing only to draw in a breath he deliberately mangles in memory of a once experienced panic attack.

It’s stark and dark as before, but Here’s The Thing amps up the retro aesthetic they’d begun to purposefully explore on Skinty Fia.

A track which has a Britpop era compactness as guided by early Placebo, with vocals high in the register, it’s a paean to love as experience, with the fallback of heading into oblivion (‘To be anaesthetised/And crave emotion’).

Need an analogy? Well, if Romance was a book you’d struggle to put it down. The opening title-track is a masterpiece, the accompaniment to the beginning or end of a movie which left you somehow elated without understanding, the space between the notes as vital as the noise itself.

Equally remarkable is the beatific shoegaze of Sundowner, on which guitarist Conor Curley takes lead vocals for the first time, the hazy, cloud topping melody perhaps the first genuinely beautiful music they’ve collectively ever written.

If that’s one form of rejecting the fiction of 21st century life, The Modern World offers another; written in LA and using Lana Del Rey’s disenchantment as a touchstone, against its orchestral strings the lyrics imagine a throuple drawn together as they prepare to eke out an existence.

This dealing with physicality is an aspect Chatten explores in other places – on the epic smear of Desire, Death Kink’s guilty look in the rearview mirror of a manipulative relationship – with the latter being the clearest path forward from Dogrel’s relative simplicity.

For a group of friends who used to lash around Dublin reading poetry to each other and were dubbed a ‘Millennial Thin Lizzy’ by one critic, such departures might in times gone have felt like a betrayal.

Few higher complements though should be paid than that Bug and Motorcycle Boy each have qualities which bring to mind the final The Smiths album Strangeways, Here We Come, a record that was just as bleakly lovelorn. We should hope also that as mutually their fourth, this is the limit of any mirroring.

Things end with Favourite and its permanently grinning, uber-indie riff, one that helps you unhear the references to Margaret Thatcher and the paranoia of being stalked. Chatten has described it as an outlier, but to innocent, dumber ears it’s totally within the album’s skin.

Few bands have taken such revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary, turns. This Romance is a place after all, one where career peaking albums are sent like postcards.

Fontaines DC at last want to share a padlock, and despite what everybody says about the end of world, they know true love never dies.