A Love Affair: Fontaines D.C. 'Romance'
Growing alongside a band can be hard: you both change as time goes by. On 'Romance', Fontaines D.C. excavate love and come out stronger than ever.
It’s a far cry from the days of Dublin city skies and television screens. There’s nothing left for them at The Lotts, and the lounger is a distant memory. The only place for Fontaines D.C. to hide is that universal state and emotion: love. Love is the main thing, they once sang. This is the arena they have chosen to fight in for their newest record, Romance. But as we quickly discover, love is cruel and smiles at situations which it cannot see.
For a band that dreamed of being big, and for someone who was there the day Dogrel came out when it all seemed so youthful and dreamy, their current immensity is both staggering and terrifying. Over five years and four albums (five if you include frontman Grain Chatten’s solo record), they have extended an arm from their early Dublin beginnings and thrown themselves into the stratosphere.
And yet, Fontaines have always remained nothing but authentic. They’re a band that affixed their identity to their name. Joyce once stated, ‘I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.’ The same is true for Fontaines. Members of the band have often expressed how they never know whether Chatten is writing songs about his fiancée or Dublin. The lyrical nature of the first two Fontaines records combined Irish colloquialisms and expansive dreamscape imagery to tell gritty, tactile, and poignant stories. You can hear it in the beauty of ‘Oh Such a Spring’, or in the chant of ‘Liberty Belle’, and especially in the whirlwind imagery of ‘A Lucid Dream’. His quest is to understand an immense emotional landscape, even if it just means excavating his own home to get to some kind of answer.
This singular approach is elevated to the universal by the band’s sheer power. The duelling fantasia of Carlos O'Connell and Conor Curley, the grumbling and steadfast bass of Conor Deegan III, and the metronomic pulse of Tom Coll sends Chatten’s drawling voice and lyrics skyward. Fontaines’ ability to speak to basic elemental desires and fears grabbed me from the beginning. Anyone who knows me well enough knows how close this band and their music is to my heart. I like to think I was there when the wind changed in their direction, and I have happily floated with them in any direction they just so happened to go.
At the end of the A Hero’s Death Tour, the band played their biggest show (up to that date) at London’s Alexandra Palace. It was a well-deserved victory lap for a group who had finally made it big. Standing at the front of this crowd as the band entered the sold-out 10,000 person room, you got a sense that this was a generational moment, a point where a band had reached as high as any band wished to go. I don’t recall much of the show as I was thrown and thrashed about in puddles of sweat and joy. But as I was leaving the arena, I felt somewhat at a loss. It was as if my little secret - this band that was selfishly mine - was suddenly not so secret anymore. I was no longer the single person that Chatten sung to. His dense imagery was stretched to breaking point in front of a massive audience. In a strange way, I felt lonely listening to their music in this setting. It almost failed to connect at the visceral level I wanted it to, as a setting for me and this band to feel at one with each other.
I continued to listen (religiously) to their music but I never got that same feeling that I felt when I first discovered those early songs. I was a fan enough to review an early copy of Skinty Fia for a University paper. It came out just as I was most homesick, miles from the people I loved, and just trying to hold on to my sense of self. Now, Skinty Fia feels somewhat stuck in limbo: not quite far enough from where they had come from, and confused about where they were going. It has some of their strongest songs (the bands magnum opus ‘I Love You’) and some of their weakest (I’ve got my eye on you ‘How Cold Love Is’). But it was also the album that soundtracked many late nights in cold gardens in Bristol, smoking and drinking until the sun came up. It powered innumerable drunken singalongs at parties and post-work clean-ups. It was a massive album that spoke to many that now sometimes feels strangely distant - lost to the memory of past triumphs.
But we move quickly in Fontaines years. Where do you go now that you’ve gone so far from where you began? There is no place left to go except straight to the heart of the matter. You must go inwards.
Romance is all technicolour apocalypse. The slow sludge of Skinty Fia has evaporated and been washed in a different wave of sound. The looseness of A Hero’s Death has been replaced by mechanical rhythms and swathes of guitars. The vibrant youthful heart of Dogrel is being questioned every step of the way. Chatten explained that his desire was to create an album that connected with people just as the recent Blur reunion shows at Wembley Stadium did. ‘I didn't want to write, like, a Champagne Supernova, but I did want to do something that felt like it was deep within and far without,’ he told The Guardian. Romance goes deeper and further than any previous Fontaines record.
We start cinematically with the oppressive title track. It sounds like the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack if it was directed by Stanley Kubrick. Grian sings:
Into the darkness again In with the pigs in the pen And God knows I love ye Screws in my head I'll be beside you Til' you're dead
As the title track morphs into the panic stricken single ‘Starburster’ and the crunching swing of ‘Here’s The Thing’, we quickly leave behind the Fontaine’s of old for a band stretching their sound to its out limits. Even when they harken back to their early days like ‘In The Modern World’, that stylistically plays like a A Hero’s Death leftover, they find ways to bend the familiar into something more cinematic. And then, as you listen to the record morph and balloon, the band starts to evolve around you.
This is the first Fontaines D.C. album that challenges what a Fontaines record can be. Where Dogrel, A Hero’s Death, and Skinty Fia felt connected to a certain musical lineage, Romance is a jolt into the unknown.
‘Horseness Is the Whatness’ (there had to be at least one Joyce reference), flourishes slowly, blooming into a beautifully melancholic fable. It slowly expands from the sound of a heartbeat to pose the central question of the album:
Will Someone Find out what the word is That makes the world go round Cause I thought it was love But some say That it has to be choice
The songs themes question and subvert ‘love’ as an idea, but they also hint at Fontaines ability to choose whatever path they so desire. They play with the tense and violent guitars of early 2000’s metal on ‘Here’s The Thing’ and the heart palpitating ‘Death Kink’. The epic ‘Bug’ and ‘Sundowner’ (sung by guitarist Conor Curley) both hint at The Verve’s anthemic shoegaze and Slowdive’s sweeping orchestration respectively.
‘Favourite’, the album’s closer, feels almost cloyingly familiar, reframing a Cure-like guitar line with the melancholy-jangle of The Smiths. However, it worms its way into your head through universal melodic simplicity and Chatten’s ability to, ‘Slip the sunshine to the day’, piercing the fabric of melancholy to find something beautiful.
Nestled amongst three of the four singles is the album’s most awe-inspiring song, ‘Desire’. As the music quietly revolves around two chords while Chatten sways on the word desire, electrical static gives way to full blown Oasis sized orchestration and drums. The guitars flood in, swimming through the sound of sparkling and shimmering light, like watching the ocean become blinding on a summer’s day. The finale’s refrain of ‘Every 24’ wretchin’ with desire’ circles endlessly until you feel your feet lift from the ground.
However, Romance is not a romantic record. It frames love and romance as deeply twisted and intangible emotional states. You lose yourself in love, and it can be hard to make out the person you are. ‘It’s so hard to find you, the mist you’ve acquired, has you turned to, a liar’, Chatten sings on ‘Desire’. The albums closest sibling is Blur’s 13, an album that deals with heartbreak by disintegrating how people expected Blur to sound. Romance is framed as a battlefield of the heart, a record that challenges and is challenged. It is never easy, and sometimes it can be blinding, destructive, and down-right abusive.
But it can also be a place where you set aside the person you once were to understand the person you’re turning into. Sometimes you can’t help but become someone new. The songs on Romance aren’t attached to who Fontaines once were, but who they are becoming. They challenge the essence of what made this band so special to so many people when they first arrived wide eyed and hungry.
To say I love this band would be superfluous at this stage. When the first songs of this album were being released, I was in a state of questioning my love for them. Although I enjoyed what they had been releasing, I was worried that maybe they (or I) had moved on. Was I just pretending to love them? Do these songs still speak to me as they once did? Has my small band left me behind as they have grown into this massive Finsbury Park-playing monolith? This all seems selfish, and it’s because it is. You’re protective of the thing you love most. You also worry that it may have changed from that exact thing you loved in the first place.
On Romance, Fontaines D.C. have changed. Their dreams have come true, but some of them have ‘turned to nothing’. Their previous wide-eyed nature has turned to paranoia that is drowned in a variety of new colours and sounds. But what they understand is their audience has changed as well. Our fears and anxieties only grow with age. They don’t go away when we expect them to. Romance feels refreshing because it has taken what makes Fontaines brilliant and shifted it sideways.
As the album closes, it is clear that Chatten’s voice has become not just clearer, but more beautiful, something that I never would have previously described it as. He sings, ‘You’ve been my favourite for a long time.’ By this point, it’s hard to distinguish who he’s talking to. It might be Dublin. It might be his fiancée. But I like to think that it might be us, the people that care for this band. We’ve been here a long time, and sometimes it’s been complicated. Thankfully with Romance, despite the many challenges and growing pains, Fontaines D.C. have reaffirmed that there is always something fresh and wonderful for us to discover, together.
Brilliant James