It's the Vinyl Countdown: #4 "Romance" by Fontaines D.C.
Counting down my five favorite records released in 2024
“Amaazing.”
This word, delivered with a sense of lilting wonder that runs contrary to the dark temperature of the song that I’m quoting it from (Side B, Track 4 “Death Kink”), has become a regular feature in the script of my internal monolog.
You didn’t use the word amazing before?
Of course I did. But now I mimic singer Grian Chatten’s delivery of it at any—and every—opportunity.
What do I mean by that?
Toast falls off the counter and lands butter side up.
“Amaazing.”
Massive swells and surf on Capitola Beach.
“Amaazing.”
Where am I going with this?
Amazing is an amazing word. It’s flexible. Multi-faceted. Loaded.
By changing the way it’s said, you can change the way it’s received. Amazing can come off as serious, adoring, cheeky, sarcastic, genuine, reverent, and sometimes even bored. Alter your human voice. Tweak your face. Roll your eyes. Open your heart as you form the word with your mouth. When the word comes out, what shape will it take?
It is a true linguistic rollercoaster of a word.
“Amaazing.”
All this to say, in 2024, Fontaines D.C. made an amaazing record. It is loaded with multiple personalities and song shapes, and I find all of them amaazing. And I mean that in a genuine and adoring way. And it’s not just about the songs.
Fontaines D.C. have done an amazing thing. They have shape shifted. They have evolved. They have reinvented. Between their first record, Dogrel, and this, their fourth record, Romance, the band have changed.
People don’t like change.
Fine.
But I find it….
Wait for it…
I find their change…amaazing.
Evolution came to the door—no. Not evolution, Life. Life came to the door and changed them and switched things up and got the moment excited again and redefined expectation and I am HERE FOR IT.
To me, Dogrel, an album that I discovered during lockdown, is lads on a corner smoking, yelling at cars. Dogrel is working class yarns about the grittiness of wet bricks and being in your twenties and confused and mad for no reason. Dogrel is poets, for sure, telling stories of life in the outer. Lads with a softer side. In the world. Conversations and situations. Cars and dark alleys. It is of the surface, above ground. Raw.
Dogrel was of the streets.
Romance is of the heart.
Exterior life verses interior thought.
It’s a gross generalization, of course, and just my response to try get a grip on what to say about this album, but how about this?
Change happens.
If you’re lucky.
We grow up and we experience more. Our thoughts are more reflective, rich, complex and messy. We—simply put—find more sides.
To life and ourselves.
I’m not saying that I think Dogrel was one dimensional—far from it. I swam in the energy of that record for a long time, wanting to be Big, and yelling at the world that I was Too Real for them. But with Romance, we are presented with a band that is telling us that life is a Rubik’s cube. There are sides. There are colors. Each square has its own temperature and hue. It is twistable and with each twist you can mix colors and changes degrees, and each variation is explorable and interpretable and Wow!
“Amaazing.”
But enough of this, let’s twist this cube. Let’s talk about the songs.
Romance. I’m going to take the album name at face value. This is a record about love. This is a big feelings record. Big feelings expressed in myriad ways. The highs and lows. Because as you know, love is not one thing.
It is amaazing.
Is it wonderful and painful and dirty and gritty and confusing and lacking and overwhelming and fast and hot and welcome and absent. And more. So many sides. So many combinations. The colors, man! Twisted.
The title track, Side A, Track 1 “Romance” sets a rather ominous tone. It thumps and creeps into your body and consciousness—just like love. And that can be a good or a bad thing, I guess. Maybe romance IS a place? Love is certainly somewhere you visit, but romance and romanticization of love can be problematic.
The expectations set are often not met.
Tangent. If you couple the feel of this track with the closing track “Favourite,” I think you get the bookends of love. Love is a place you enter. A unknown semi-darkness. It’s a place you come out of having changed and while that change can be positive or negative, there is always the remembrance of that love. We all have a time when someone was our ‘favourite thing’, and their absence, for whatever reason and no matter how painful, can also be called upon with a sort of uplifting joy.
We’ll always have Paris, as they say.
But I’m jumping ahead. Bookends? What about all the other books on the shelf of this album?
Side A, Track 2. “Starburster.” There’s the spitting lines in our faces, the rhyming precision, (check the lyrics) and that gasp. It’s the gasp that gets me. It is the lung-led equivalent of the word amazing. A quick and urgent inhaled breath to keep going. It is running on empty. It is panic in the moment. It is. It is. It is. If this is the first Fontaines D.C. song you’ve heard since Dogrel, take a breath. Don’t panic. Change is good. Let it wash you clean.
But how is this a song about love? Romance, people. I think we romanticize the hustle. We romanticize the pursuit of things, material and emotional. There are so many things we want that are just out of reach.
The momentary blissness? The gasp? What’s that?
The pursuit of the thing can damage. Just take a breath. Reset. Oxygenate your brain. But what would I know? My hands are up—I don’t know. My skill at the pursuit of finding meaning where there is none is amaazing. Inhaled gasp! Moving on.
Side A is top to bottom solid. “Here’s the Thing” leading into “Desire” then “In the Modern World.” The flow of this section. Class.
“Here’s the Thing” hides pain behind the facade of happiness. We all wear a mask. And confession: I get slightly triggered by the phrase ‘here’s the thing,’ just like when people start a sentence with “Again,” as though you weren’t listening three sentences ago when they said the thing they’re about to ‘again’ you with. But I digress.
Side A, Track 4 “Desire” is completely upfront about the pain of wanting. Every day, ‘every 24’ you can reach for that thing—we are programed by society to want it (which I think is the implied lie of life)—and our desires are somehow dreamily just out of reach and boy, oh boy, should we give up?
It's high to be wanted
But haunted is higher
And the change requiresDesire
The change it requires to get the things we want or to make us desirable to others, perhaps? You have to really want it. Do you really want it? With this meaning muddied, it makes sense to roll right into the confusion of life with “In the Modern World.”
I don’t feel anything in the modern world.
Are any of us capable of feeling anything in the modern world? Escape. Take a breath. I don’t feel bad. Lots to unpack here. I’m wondering that if all we can feel—all we should hope or aspire to feel—is alive? Is that the most we can hope for? This one has me thinking. Am I a law unto myself?
Side A closes out with “Bug.” This, I think I have to say, is a grower. Let’s read too much into it, shall we?
Throughout, the song keeps throwing in the word promise. Promise to me is a true romance word. The promise of love, promise ring, marriage vow promise, and just the fickleness of promise. A throwaway word people use to cover their arses.
Well, I changed my name to "promise you", yeah
It's easier than me making apologies, yeah
It can be a band-aid word. Promises can be broken. Promises are OFTEN broken with no consequences. You promised. Yeah, but...
Promise this, promise that. A powerful word that is powerful in all its forms. As a truth and as a lie. As for the Bug title? I think it’s like a fly in the ointment theme. An ugly truth that sullies the scene. The promise of promise broken.
“Amaazing.” (-ly wrong? Talk amongst yourselves.)
Side B. We are past halfway through the album here and open the account with “Motorcycle Boy,” which in my mind is just a quick palette cleanser to take us into the dreamy change of pace of Side B’s, Track 2 “Sundowner.” Romance is loud and soft. There are lulls and moments of reflection. Side B seems to have more of the soft, and that’s OK.
Sundowner. Maybe it’s because my mum had dementia, but Sundowner to me is a dreamy word for an ugly thing and I can’t help but go to there when I hear this song. The rise of agitation in the afternoon. The confusion of a mind disappearing. The ability to remember love and connection runs off, while those witnessing the battle are left to watch with hearts squeezed in helpless agony.
This is not a song about dementia, obviously, but within its verses I feel the lament for the retreat of a bond. The inevitable loss. Is that it? The sun sets on everything. It sets on love. It sets on romance. It sets on friendships. It sets on life. It’s a beautiful, dreamy chorus, and whatever it means, the more I listen to this one, the more it punches me in the heart.
“Amaazing.”
Side B’s, Track 9 “Horseness is the Whatness.”1 Its roiling swell pulls us through a romantic landscape of choices and options. This is one song on the album that directly references love. Love. Trust. Never let your guard down. All the basics you’re playing with, and the vigilance required leading to an outcome that cannot be guaranteed.
It sticks around for some
While always stays for none.
Nailed it.
And here we are at “Death Kink,” featuring the word amazing on which I have hung this whole response. It’s a little dark.
It’s a little in your face. It’s a little banger of a grinder to build you right up to the top of the romance roller coaster. It is perhaps not such a healthy relationship in this song. It is called Death Kink. You work it out. The juxtaposition of amazing and stars and dreams and there’s that word promise again against the dark theme—oof. This love thing is COMPLEX.
And now. My favorite thing on my 4th favorite album listen of 2024. Honestly, having spent all morning writing about it I’m second-guessing its rank now. Should it be higher? Ugh. I don’t know! Anyway. Side B, Track 5, “Favourite.”
This one for me is about people entering your life and you loving them so fully and completely in that moment and at that time that it feels like forever but then is not. Things fade away, but the fading away is far from tragedy.
Whether this is the love that fizzled out or people who leave our lives through death, doesn’t matter. There is joy and tenderness to this song. And this is a song about loss—quite an achievement.
The passage of time does not dim the memory. The word favorite does so much heavy lifting in this song. Wrapped up in the word is the remembrance of time of connection of once shared dreams and change and pain and nostalgia and experience and the absolute sigh of it all.
At one point, your favorite thing. Gone. Gone. Gone. But to be gone is to still be present. I hold onto this thought when I think of things past. Of people who have come and gone from my life.
What a ride this album is. Put it on. Play it loud.
Fontaines D.C. Proving themselves to be shapeshifters. More than one thing. Multi-dimensional.
Twist the cube. Change the game. Alter the angle. Get out of the box you feel put in. The word evolution begins with love reversed. Backwards forwards sideways and more.
Love love love, all ways love.
“Amaazing.”
Extra credit reading
Rachel Cabitt from The Art of Cover Art did a write up on the design and aesthetic of the album, including interview with the XL Art Director for the project. Read it 👉 The Visual Romance Behind Fontaines D.C.'s New Era
FINAL It’s the Vinyl Countdown List
In case you missed any, catch up on your reading and listening.
#5: “Confidenza” soundtrack by Thom Yorke
#4: “Romance” by Fontaines D.C.
#3: “A Dream is All We Know” by The Lemon Twigs
#2: “Mahashmashana” by Father John Misty
#1: TIE “Wall of Eyes” by The Smile and “TANGK” by IDLES
Here is a playlist of all these records
A sleeper hit with all James Joyce fans, I’m sure. According to this excerpt from Genius:
“Horseness is the whatness of allhorse” is a quote in James Joyce’s Ulysses, of which the song’s title draws its name from. The song was written by guitarist Carlos O’Connell, whose inspiration came from reading Joyce novels aloud to his infant daughter. Precisely, the title appears in the episode of “Scylla & Charybdis”, where Stephen Dedalus delivers a lecture about Shakespeare and Hamlet at the National Library of Ireland.
A second source Cracked “Fontaines D.C.: Love Without Limits”