Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The truth is slowly being erased in the name of progress’ elitist sibling, gentrification, everywhere you look there is the eradication of what makes a city or a town hum with excitement, with the friction of what is real and what sticks out like a sore thumb in the face of modern and the beige. Yet despite the feeling of up to date dogma and glistening glass that shrouds us all into being consumers of the unwanted, there is still the Dogrel of those who refuse banality and same safe thoughts of not standing out, the voice of those who perhaps read Joyce’s Dubliners and revelled in the early punk ethic captured by The Boomtown Rats and who now commit to keeping a certain culture alive and beating hard.
“One by one they were all becoming shades…” an opening gambit in which the reflection of our modern life stands at the crossroads. The poet might look upon this scene and feel the heat of nostalgia burn, the loss of community in favour of the distraction, the yearning to wander aimlessly into a pub and be lost in fog and regretful but drug-like need, melancholy. It is the crude, the guttural and the immersive sensation that glides down the throat in the same silky way that good whiskey can be measured, evoking pastures lost and the damnation of those that tore your memories down.
James Joyce may have captured Dublin at a time of change, a place which revolutions were won but soon turned into their own staid political dogma, but there is now a greater threat to the past, one in which Fontaines D.C. reflect upon with a gruff insistence, a passionate case of the real and swept along by a tidal wave of romance, of spanking the hypocritical nature espoused by some who see the world as a place where tradition, value and honest endeavour is to be purchased, bought and paid for with loaned money from the depths of Hell.
To continue with James Joyce’s words, “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age”, and in the tracks Too Real, Television Screens, Chequeless Reckless, Liberty Belle, Boys In Better Land and Dublin City Sky frame the anger of the album perfectly, a maxim to the fight at hand, knowing that change must happen but not at the expense of the people, never allowing community or history to be written out of existence.
A stunning, vocal, and in tune with the times album, one in which is an absolute pleasure to hear.
Fontaines D.C. release Dogrel on April 12th via Partisan Records.
Ian D. Hall