FONTAINES D.C. – DOPAMINE CHAMBER: REVIEW
FONTAINES D.C.
Dopamine Chamber (XL)
BEYONG ITS ROLE as a kind of pleasure spring, the thing that is triggered by activities that offer rewards of joy or warmth or satisfaction or achievement on one hand, or dissolution, disengagement and the dulling of pain on the other, dopamine’s most telling impact is in reinforcing behaviour. That felt good, let’s do it again; I lost track of what was making me unhappy when doing that, let’s do it again; I want everything/nothing, let’s do it again.
This is addiction, or how it starts, of course, but this is also sanity if understood and nurtured. Find what brings you joy and repeat is what half the wellness influencers say after all. (The other half say find what brings you joy, repeat and send me $39.95 a month to learn how to do that. But that’s another story.) And maybe joy for you is being without a compass but having a voice telling you the compass was always faulty so why bother when a path will eventually show itself or be formed by your direction of travel.
Lost in the cavernous spaces of Dopamine Chamber, a kind of Tardis that isn’t just bigger on the inside than out but potentially endless, the pleasure principle is complicated.
This feels like gloom, but it can rise to the edges of euphoria, a giddy sense of being overwhelmed but carried on, carried further, carried. “I can help you disappear, cinematic feeling,” Grian Chatten sings. Yet the slices of anger and balls of emotion coming hard for you that have characterised a good portion of their work to now are modulated, definitely here but mutated into something simmering: you do not tumble, buffeted or thrown forward, but you do feel the accumulation of thoughts, like adding a layer of clothing at each song and being grateful as the chill settles in.
It is also a flattened sonic landscape, its peaks stunted, its gorges descending only just beyond your reach. Here the bass doesn’t rumble, instead it glowers and moves in to take up space; the guitars arrange themselves in a tight circle of tension, and while once or twice they charge towards you (as in Happy For You), mostly they link arms and close off areas for stray leaks out; the keyboards can verge on the claustrophobic but as a kind of reverse of the guitars, between them light does leak in, in part to highlight how the space any listener inhabits is defined by absence. “Shit, I’m sorry, didn’t realised I called.”
But the variations within that narrow range offer multiple sources of direction, just as the wrecked and constantly rebuilding world the Irishmen are describing – social and traditional media amok, insecurity being personal not just financial, relationships unsteady on their feet – is multifarious.
In the updated Lee Hazelwood atmosphere of Where Is Gone?, with Rosalia, the Spanish singer whose album last year was madly ambitious and deliberately over the top at times, the rolling punch of the drums pierces thick walls of indecision about the value of pursuing a love. Not to be definitive though, more like a recurring point being raised. Those same snapping drums take a more prominent role in Marianne, where a “dream fog is calling” and an invitation to retreat to safety feels temptingly easy but unlikely long term. But in Demolition – which teases with its nods to peak Oasis reimagined by Gary Numan – the wreckage isn’t in singular impacts but the unified swarm of sound coming at you.
Is this dense chamber, the dopamine heavy in its application - “More abuse than an Adderall” – is all of this, or any of it, survivable? Pleasure is unshaped, so why not?
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Apple Music: Listen to Fontaines D.C. – Dopamine Chamber
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