by Jeff Yerger (@jyergs)
“Life ain’t always empty. Life ain’t always empty. Life ain’t always empty. Life ain’t always empty.”
If there’s one thing you’ll remember from Fontaines D.C.’s new album A Hero’s Death, it’s this: a single repeated line – a mantra, a meditation – from a title track full of them. Grian Chatten, the band’s head poet, delivers this line with the same nonchalance as one would read a slogan on a billboard. After a year and a half of touring, Chatten has presumably seen millions of these insignificant one-liners through the window of a van, far away from the comfort of the pubs in Dublin, Ireland. Read enough of these things, and the more convincing they become. After all, a mantra is only a meaningless combination of words until you repeat it.
On A Hero’s Death, the band uses their words as a form of mediation. It’s one of the more noticeable traits of the new songs. The more Chattan repeats lines like “life ain’t always empty” or “love is the main thing,” the more they sound like mantras. Depending on your mileage for this sort of thing, using a mantra as a form of mediation is supposed to ease the mind and soul, like a prayer. On paper they may come across as preachy, but on the record, Chattan sounds like a guy who values the sentiment in these words even though he can see right through them. Maybe I’m a sucker for buying into the slogans on A Hero’s Death, but to me, through the lens of the current hellscape that is the year 2020, they come across like little prayers. Maybe that’s the point.
Fontaines D.C.’s words have been the foundation of who they are as a band from the very beginning. I’ve always found their origin story charmingly quaint: just five guys (Chatten, along with guitarists Carlos O'Connell and Conor Curley, bassist Conor Deegan, and drummer Tom Coll) from the same music school who wanted to get together not to start a band but to share poetry about the human experience and the country they loved. They’re still those same Yeats-worshiping boys, but the stakes of their words are now much higher. Fontaines D.C. now represent an entire city scene – perhaps even an entire country – from which they were born. On Dogrel, they called their shot, and since then it’s been clear that Dublin was never going to be big enough to contain them. Like the hair of the dog, onward they go into the daunting sophomore effort.
On A Hero’s Death, the differences between their beginnings and now are immediately palpable. It’s only been a year and a half, but the band has clearly changed. Where “Big” was a bold, confident opening statement, “I Don’t Know” starts out the album as the anti-“Big” in every way. “You shoulda heard me in the lounger / telling people what they was … I don’t belong to anyone,” Chattan sighs with the road-weary tone of a man who has learned more about himself after a year-plus of touring than most people do in a lifetime. It’s an honest, self-reflective beginning to the album, and it sets the tone beautifully.
Musically, A Hero’s Death finds Fontaines D.C. painting with darker palates, while emphasizing a beauty that up until now they’ve mostly shied away from. I guess you can still call it “post-punk,” but the idea of what post-punk is is up for debate and evolving every day. Whatever you want to call it, A Hero’s Death is sonically richer than its predecessor and even some of the band’s contemporaries. The songs here are more meditative and given more room to breathe, like on the dreamy album highlight “You Said,” or the smoky, lounge-y “Sunny,” which features a Beach Boys-like harmony over a gorgeous string arrangement.
Like its predecessor, there is still an overall feeling of restlessness and tension on A Hero’s Death. By working once again with producer Dan Carey, the band was able to capture the manic energy of their live show, which is apparent in the unrelenting rhythms of the chaotic “Lucid Dreams,” the swaggering “Televised Mind,” and the claustrophobic “Living in America.” These songs are dense, rugged, and heavy, and the way the instrumentation swirls around and envelopes you creates a sort of visceral intensity.
On the album closer “No,” Fontaines D.C. once again find time to breathe. Like standing on a cloudy beach watching a summer storm float away over the ocean, it’s a moment of meditation and reflection at the end of a chaotic second half to the album. Chattan once again bellows a final refrain, “even though you don’t know / you feel.” The moment feels earned, given the nature of what came before it. Chattan’s voice feels like it’s right in front of you. It feels like you’re sharing a smoke with a friend over a late night philosophical conversation. You may not know the meaning of his words, but the conviction of his delivery makes it feel like it means everything in the world, like a mantra. That’s the beauty of A Hero’s Death. While it may not grab you as immediately as Dogrel did, it will reward repeated listens like any good mantra does.