Love is not patient or kind. It fails and boasts. It appears contorted, grim, armed, and it poisons the angered soul with swarming radon so profuse it slowly disintegrates the already dying heart. The distorted face of fidelity desperately trying to escape our most valued artery is the cover of a Valentine's card written by Fontaines D.C. The inside notes are Romance.
The Dublin-made, London-based quintet have excavated every crevice of post-punk over their short but disarmingly productive career. They barked, bit and howled their way through their debut Dogrel, professing their ambition through beat poetry and traditional '80s post-punk. Their sophomore, A Hero's Death, garnered them their first Grammy nomination by way of Brian Jonestown Massacre-style psychedelia, and their masterwork Skinty Fia's alarmingly aphotic tones reflected a disaffected band, alienated from their home country, scrappily piecing together what could be the definitive sound of modern-day post-punk.
Love has always been central to Fontaines' work; they wear it on their sleeves. Love for each other as friends and bandmates, love for sonic exploration, love for The Godfather, of which they took their band name, and most notably, love for their home republic. But, after three albums, the outfit seems less concerned with what they love and more concerned with why they love: the essence of love.
"Maybe Romance is a place," claims vocalist and principal songwriter Grian Chatten on the titular album opener. Though domineering bass lines and head-splitting cymbal crashes, Chatten's whispering voice welcomes us into the darkness with a wooden spike ready to claim our hearts. Maybe romance is in literature or on the warning label of a pack of smoke, he asks in "Horseness is the Whatness," but wherever it is, Chatten will be there, screws in head, "until death."
Although the diverging sound of Romance is the most prominent and notable shift for the band, Chatten's prevailing instinctual and reactive lyrics guide a significant portion of Romance. His lyrical gymnastics on "Starbuster" paint an impressionistic portrait of a man tumbling through a panic attack. "Over harder than a turned up challenger / I wanna keep all your charm in a canister / Do you inspire like the same did Salinger / I'm the pig on the Chinese calendar / I got a shadow like a 5/8 Caliber / I wanna move like a new Salamander…" on and on he raps, only managing to breathe through deep hyperventilation.
Chatten's lyrics are perhaps the most conceptual they've ever been. They're dizzying, clear yet confusing, dirty, precise and tormented. The record's scale is immense — like love, it feels impulsive, melodramatic, glittery and fantastical. At times, the band has trouble blending all their concepts, sounds and conditions, which leads to moments where melodies, mellotrons and strings get in the way of sonic cohesion. But for a band so well versed in sonic exploration, Romance is their most ambitious, mostly for the best.
It's rather trite to compare Ireland's best contemporary band with Ireland's most significant artistic export, but considering the spectre that looms over much of Romance, it's impossible not to mention James Joyce. Like Joyce, Fontaines uses animals to form an abstract concept that expresses universal experiences — greed, love, trust. Throughout Romance, he references the pig (wealth, luck, sincerity), the salamander (good/evil, light/dark), and the horse (power, beauty, freedom).
"Horseness is the Whatness," written by guitarist Carlos O'Connell, takes its title directly from Joyce's Ulysses, exploring the permeability of abstract language, stripping it down to its chaotic essentials to uncover the crux of meaning. For Joyce, it's a comedic way to undermine one of his characters; for Fontaines, it's about uncovering romance as the whatness of love. "Will someone find out what the word is that makes the world go round / 'Cause I thought it was love," sighs Chatten. "I guess I get the gist / There's not that much to miss."
Despite much of Romance being a direct and intentional effort by the band to escape the omnipresence of Joyce and Ireland in their work, leaving their identity and trauma on the other side of the Irish Sea is easier said than done.
Statistics for Irish youth are bleak. Suicide is the most common cause of death in teens and young adults, and as the tech industry swoops into the hearts of the cities, it pushes the disaffected out. Dublin is also the third most expensive city to live in Europe, leading to a high rate of poverty and a heroin epidemic in the city. It's a wound that Fontaines have bore throughout their career (see "I Love You" or "The Lotts"), so it's no wonder that closing track "Favourite" writes the chapter on chemical dependencies and depression into the band's book on love. "Well look who's just the newest clown / 35 hours coming down / And the sun shines on new pavement / And you don't even feel it," sings Chatten over the deceptively optimistic jangle pop shimmer. Collective trauma and grief, no matter how ugly, is part of love: "The misery made me another marked man."
The unity of love is expressed primarily through the sound of Romance. The album takes influences from the likes of Alice in Chains and Korn, while its arena resonance was inspired by Chatten seeing Blur perform at Wembley Stadium. Its unpretentious influences cater to an idea about the universality of music; The grandiose, cinematic, and anthemic quality of songs like "Here's the Thing," "Starbuster" or "In the Modern World" experiment with the idea that the more people can sing along with a song, the less emotional weight the songwriter has to carry. An ocean of fans repeating Chatten's manic lyrics about a panic attack back to him makes it feel much less like an individual war.
Fantasy plays a significant role throughout Romance. Dancing with sensual lyrics, staring down the barrel of identity immolation and ideological decay, and finding peace in losing yourself in a relationship. This is no elementary Valentine's card; it's a treacherous and wonderfully unreliable encyclopedia of romance.