FONTAINES D.C.
Romance (XL/Remote Control)
RECENTLY I CAME ACROSS a TV interview with an Irish comedian who was explaining how when she was growing up, the idea – even the very existence in the hands of anyone people knew – of sunglasses was beyond the ken of her parents. Why would you bother when the sun wasn’t going to last and when it was here it wasn’t that strong in any case.
Basically, this was Ireland for feck’s sake.
The fourth album from Dublin’s Fontaine D.C., a record which sees them sail past their (temporal and emotional) roots and into a world of big rooms and large-scale visions, is one whose future is bright enough to need shades, but which exists in a present that remains cloudy enough to bring that need into question. It flashes with a positive glow – in the final track, Grian Chatten says “Did you know I could claim the dreamer from the dream/Make you feel everything you’ve never even seen?”, and it feels like belief.
Why not, after all? But between those flashes are long stretches of grey to be interrogated and grappled with. Maybe to be understood, maybe to fuel further explorations, maybe just to be.
It’s worldly but it’s still Ireland.
Romance is most usefully seen in contrast, or at least in the shadow of the songs that (might be assumed to) bring the thin rays of sunshine. Those would be Here’s The Thing, a thin end of the wedge that pulses with a Belly/Breeders rolling momentum; In The Modern World, resolutely staring down the dark and almost swaying in its hushed resistance to the wind; Bug, which puts folk/rock in the back seat and drives towards the horizon; and Favourite, which positively charges at the world on a bright-eyed guitar riff, backing vocals sweetly aah-ing, and teenage energy-let-free drums.
Favourite in particular finds joy and exuberance, firstly in reminiscences of childhood that aren’t always happy but feel like connection, and then in the throwing arms and body around the park exuberance of its tempo that makes a connection by finding the happy. In some ways it is a disconcerting way to end the record, not least because Chatten has described through the song how “misery made me another marked man/And I’m always looking over my shoulder”.
But as an ending it’s not without merit given the shadings which preceded it. Like how the LA-influenced and referenced In The Modern World aches with both serious doubts about people and place (“In the modern world, I don’t feel anything”) and then, as it becomes grander on mixed-low strings and pushed-up drums, dogged trust in the intangible truths (“Seems so hard just to be/If it matters/You complete me”).
Around these four songs, Fontaines weave something through the remaining seven tracks that has a sense of decay built in and a wavering but still forced down lid on emotions. The scene-setting title track (“Into the darkness again/In with the pigs in the pen”) opens the album on the high menace of the forested Cure, with love declared but threatened (“And deep in the night I confide/That maybe my goodness has died”), and machines crushing small beasts. Then when a wheezy Starburster stomps toward you, feeling like a visit from Genesis Owusu (rhythmic march and angular insertions, anxiety and snatched prettiness, cinematic and yet claustrophobic) that edge is sharpened.
It’s a darkness not on the edge but in the centre, sucking in resolutions and making them disappear (like Desire, which cryptically inverts anything like its title, and late-arriving strings seal the deal), destroying them on impact (as in Death Kink’s dogged despair) or ultimately rebuffing them (like Motorcycle Boy, whose weary resignation bring something of The Anchoress’ tender force to a fledgling northern ballad).
But it’s a darkness that nonetheless is punctuated by these little holes through which the neighbouring songs’ stray lights flicker, like the caress of the backing vocals in Sundowner that promise some smidgin of comfort or the Cocteau Twins-like Horseness Is The Whatness, where western skies twang-with-strings leaves room for something beyond the declarative “There’s not that much to miss/You choose or you exist”.
It may yet bring to mind that quote usually, and wrongly, attributed to WB Yeats that “being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy”. But remember, even if temporary, even if not trusted, joy exists and leaves a mark, even if it’s a faint one.
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