By Charlie Bertsch
“Maybe romance is a place,” sings Grian Chattan of Fontaines D.C. on the first track of the band’s new album.
It’s a curious formulation, especially given the minor-key moodiness of the music, which suggests that it is a place of fear and confusion.
Given that both the song and the album are titled Romance, this problematisation of intimacy casts its shadow over the rest of the record, which turns the post-punk energy of the band’s previous records inside out.
If their 2019 debut Dogrel and its successor A Hero’s Death the following year confirmed what a force of nature Fontaines D.C. can be, Romance examines the nature of that force.
Even when the propulsive rhythms from rave-ups like “Television Screens” and “I Was Not Born” return, as on new songs “Here’s the Thing” and “Bug”, the music seems to be struggling against a heavy load.
Part of the reason is that the beat is asked to do more on Romance.
There are more tempo shifts within its songs. And the lean sound of those earlier albums has given way to a layered one that foregrounds the band’s florid multi-tracking.
Sometimes, this mutes the clarity of purpose that remains Fontaines D.C.’s greatest strength.
More often, though, it reveals new dimensions to their art and accentuates the virtues of the old ones.
As a consequence, Romance indulges different nostalgic impulses than its predecessors.
Punk still makes its presence felt, but from behind a veil.
On some tracks, we hear traces of alternative bands identified with the 1980s, such as The Smiths and The Cure.
More common are nods to Britpop’s psychedelic side.
One of the hardest things about listening to popular music is distinguishing nostalgia for a particular sound from nostalgia for the period most identified with that sound.
The problem isn’t that Oasis is a guitar-bass-and-drums band in a time when that mode of music-making is hopelessly outmoded.
Just as there will always be new jazz records in the mid-twentieth-century idioms favoured by titans like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, there will always be new rock records that recall the era when American alternative rock and Britpop pushed back against electronic dance music.
Although many of those returns to Britpop will be disappointing, there is still room within the subgenre for music that speaks to the here and now.
It certainly helps that Fontaines D.C. are an Irish band, drawing on the long tradition of artists from their country that have found success throughout the British Isles without forsaking their native antipathy towards Imperial London.
The ageing music fans thrilled that Oasis is getting back together are alienated by a cultural landscape that threatens to render them irrelevant.
Their generational solidarity should be understood dialectically.
On the one hand, they long for a time when New Labour was ascendant and being British was a reason for pride rather than embarrassment; on the other, their heads are filled with reactionary visions of a world in which white male expression wasn’t implicitly marked with an asterisk.
With the fascinating Romance, Fontaines D.C. provides a lifeline to listeners who wish to sort the good from the bad.
As the edgy videos for “Starduster,” “Here’s the Thing,” and “In the Modern World” suggest, the Irish band’s aesthetic strips the guilt from Britpop by redeploying its pleasures for a world where the instability of identity has come to the fore.
Romance does that both lyrically and musically.
It conjures a haunted place, demonstrating both Fontaines D.C.’s impressive artistic growth and the realisation that growing up is painful.
It makes sense given Brexit’s political impact on their homeland, with the explosion of anti-immigration politics in a country that had been trending left.
The romance, so to speak, about what made Ireland better than Britain is gone.
Suddenly, the Irish Republic has a very British far-right to deal with. It’s not as though xenophobia has no precedent in its history. It just wasn’t anticipated resurfacing right now.
Romance doesn’t tackle the crisis explicitly. But it’s hard to separate its heavily orchestrated noir from this context.
This record is about being let down more than anything else.
Photograph courtesy of Allan Leonard. Published under a Creative Commons license.