NEW ALBUMS
Fontaines D.C. in the grey zone, plus Lemon Twigs, The Flaming Lips, Toots, Khruangbin, The Chicks and more.
HO’D BE a five-piece rock’n’roll band in
2020? Splitting your dribble of Spotify increments five ways, gig earnings kicked to the kerb? Worse if you’re locking down in Dublin while your gear’s locked up in London. Then there are the more traditional challenges faced by a certain type of group, the sort that attracts a throng desperate for young voices of defiance and authenticity, aching for a new Clash, a new Jam or Arctic Monkeys, an audience who can’t not be disappointed, or worse, when – surprise, surprise – their heroes turn out not to be gods. Call it another British disease. Call it an Irish one, too.
Dogrel, Fontaines D.C.’s 2019 debut LP, had songs that asked for that kind of attention. Erudite but earthy, definably rock’n’roll in a time of dearth, combining the darkness and light of Joy Division and Oasis with side-notes of Smiths and Pogues. Singer Grian Chatten came off as a charismatic ingénu – full of gnarl at how things are but reaching up and out for something more glorious, even if it’s unclear that the “boys in the better land” in their most uplifting song actually exist, or have it any better than you.
They’re not the first band to have worked out that there’s a trap in here, but it’s hard to recall a younger one, or more eloquent. A conversation with bassist Conor Deegan for the Q&A on the following page ended with a thorough questioning of rock’n’roll myth-making. “What’s the real value of that?” he asked. “People meet you and they’re let down because you’re not what you are in their own imagination. You know, Sorry that I’m not the living embodiment of your favourite song…”
Is A Hero’s Death a corrective to that? It seems so. The title comes from The Hostage, a 1958 play by nationalist Dubliner Brendan Behan that filters heroism through the lens of tragic farce. It’s darker and more complex than their debut, but also bigger-sounding, closer to the wall of sound at a Fontaines D.C. gig. Producer Dan Carey, who helped make them sound like a classic indie band on Dogrel, returns after rejected LA sessions with Nick Cave and Idles man Nick Launay to helm a blooming, blustery racket with echoes of gothy ’80s post-punk. As clanging, churning opener I Don’t Belong makes clear, grey areas of doubt and stasis are the No Man’s Land
Wthey mean to explore, and “I don’t wanna belong to anyone” is not the assertion of autonomy that it might have been taken for on Dogrel. In Love Is The Main Thing, a hypnotic 12/8 monster beating like waves on a beach, Chatten’s crushed, blank tones speak of love as an absent, even forbidding ideal.
If that makes A Hero’s Death sound dour… well, it’s not cheery. But while it joins Unknown Pleasures, Pornography and The Holy Bible in a zone of disquiet, it is not as bitterly bleak. Drummer Tom Coll’s pounding battery is a tonic throughout, and prominent in the album’s two most rousing interventions: the title track, with its Last Nite dynamic and wry conviction that “life ain’t always empty…”; and the spine-tingling Televised Mind, resounding with vast, twangy Duane Eddy riffs.
Riffs are a big thing on A Hero’s Death. Deegan’s low-end is often chordal, using baritone guitar, a trick learned from listening to The Cure’s Robert Smith that liberates Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley’s twin guitars to add the melodies that Chatten – a percussive singer, increasingly exploring variations in his attack – is less free with. A Lucid Dream, its lead lines drenched in reverb, fulfills Fontaines’ ambition to make “dark surf” music; this is an ocean song for Skerries on the Irish Sea, not Santa Monica.
It’s this respect for historical song forms that adds dimension to the group. Oh Such A Spring is not the obvious Pogues homage that Dublin City Sky was on Dogrel, but it has that folk lilt and a gritty dockside milieu, where the sailors drink American wine while “life’s moving on”. So surf and folk is on one side and Living In America is the noisy urban flip, discordant amp grot sucking you into the city’s dirty beating heart.
After a while, it’s the peculiarities of A Hero’s Death that stay with you longest, the bits that don’t fit into ‘rebel rock’ or its rejection, indeed that resist instant comprehension. The “osprey tan” worn by a character in Living In America, or a line like “the bulletin board was shot up like a ward full of junk” from A Lucid Dream – Burroughs via Ballymun. Or the entirety of the monotone C86 thrash that is I Was Not Born, a song that feels like it should resolve into the certainty of an anthem, and never does.
The album ends aptly, on a literally negative note. No is a gorgeous, simple spell of a song about being stuck. In moments, you can hear Noel Gallagher singing it, except you can’t imagine him exhorting us to “appreciate the grey” and he wouldn’t sing “you feel” like Chatten does, like it’s the only lifeline he’s got. Whether Fontaines D.C. like it or not, this will be sung hard back at them in venues around the world as soon as rock gets rolling again.
Because whether Fontaines become legends despite themselves, or succeed on a more human scale, may not be up to them in the long run. Music history is full of bands who tried to re-engineer their audiences or recalibrate expectations and were not thrilled with the outcome. But what Fontaines are doing isn’t cynical; it’s another kind of romanticism to imagine that fans can love their music without turning the group into cartoons of defiance, or triumph, or cool. They can’t help but think of something better, more real, and A Hero’s Death is richer for it.