Ten times better than Taylor Swift: Romance, by Fontaines D.C., reviewed

Grade: B+

Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it translates these days – electronic bombast, which is of course available now at the flick of a switch in the studio. The song is not enough, nowhere near enough. What you need, to elevate your infantile and asinine observations of the world and your sad lack of a good choon, is confected importance. This has been increasingly true since about 1965, but never more so than now. The song is not enough? That’s because it’s not a very good song, kiddo. Write a good song and, you’ll find, marvellously, it really is enough.

Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. are a good case in point. Post punk, of course, but within that rather arid and tuneless milieu a band hitherto possessed of plenty of hooks and a quantum of energy. They still have that here, on which, bless ’em, they imagine is a dystopic fantasy. Oh, please, spare us. It’s still a goodish album, by our modern standards. You can enjoy and possibly even thrill to the power pop of ‘Here’s The Thing’ and, even more so, ‘Favourite’ – which sounds like the dB’s except slightly less charming.

The title track is a slight but pleasing melody stretched out until it forgets what it was there for. I can appreciate the restrained chug of ‘In The Modern World’. The big single – ‘Starburster’ – is truly awful, though, full of appropriated monotone ur-rap vocals with the usual inane and ungainly rhymes. But they have something, this band – something which is smothered under the tyranny of Now. In their desperation to be relevant they sacrifice the stuff which was original and good about them. It’s ten times better than Taylor Swift, though.