Great Underappreciated or Obscure Albums 3 - THE FITZGERALD by Richmond Fontaine (2005)

Jumping up the decades, here, I guess. I seem to have been gripped by "rehabilititus", and feel the need to give some bands/albums I love the credit they deserve. Slowdive is next on the list, I assure you!

With this review, I'm hoping to correct one of the worst musical oversights of the last few years. The truth is, Richmond Fontaine should be huge. They should be as big as Wilco. They should be bigger than the Kings of Leon or the White Stripes. We should be reading so much more about them than The Shins or Ryan Adams. But we're not. Instead, their music is restricted to a few very, very lucky souls. Such as me. And maybe now you as well.

RF hail from Oregon, and descend from a long line of bands that blended Rock music with folk and country. The first were Gene Clark, Gram Parsons and The Byrds. Then came Uncle Tupelo, followed by The Jayhawks and Whiskeytown. Who were in turn followed by thousands more, all churning out sweet –but perhaps overly familiar by now- songs of drink, loss, roads, love and, um, gravel. RF are not much different, to be honest, but they just do it with a sense of poetry and emotion that is pretty much unparalleled today.

Their previous opus, Post to Wire, was already pretty majestic, chock-full of gorgeously-produced songs about travelling the roads, lost and alone and blue. A vignette of modern-day American country life, it features the breathtaking turns of phrase and pained vocals of singer-songwriter Willy Vlautin, and the tight rhythm and strong musicianship of his band mates. But, if it has one defect, it’s that it’s a tad long, and seems to struggle to accommodate all its country, pop and rock sensitivities comfortably.

The Fitzgerald shares no such problems. It’s probably the most cohesive album to have been released in years, along with Antony and the Johnsons’ I am a bird now. The themes the guys explore are similar to those developed so well already on Post to Wire: financial strife, drinking, domestic violence, restlessness and death. Typical country/alt-rock fare, really! However, The Fitzgerald delves even further into these dark depths. When writing the songs for the album, Willy Vlautin locked himself in a crappy hotel in the dingiest part of downtown Reno, Nevada. Drawing on the experiences and stories of the bums, down-and-outs and lowlifes he met there, he delivered a masterpiece, a set of songs tackling the trials and tribulations of these lost souls with a stunning mixture of empathy and raw emotion.

The resulting album is therefore understandably raw and uncompromising. The opening song, ‘The Warehouse Life’, starts with a quaint portrayal of a narrator and his friend getting wasted in a bar and ends with the friend getting beaten up and robbed. ‘The Incident at Conklin Creek’ sees a man and his son discover the body of a murdered teenager in an old mineshaft. ‘Casino Lights’, set to delicate violin and deceptively jocular chords, is a tale of an abandoned child and an alcoholic uncle. All these songs are delivered in Vlautin’s deadpan, yet haunted, husky tenor. His voice is up-close, personal, like a drunken friend reciting tales of other friends who’ve gone astray. You can’t help but feel affected by these stories; the characters that people them are real, as tangible as anyone you’ve ever met. The whole of The Fitzgerald shares this sense of audio-verite, as Neil Young would put it, a sense of truth, of reality, of unrelenting honesty.

Of course, such dark and gritty lyrical matter is set to fittingly sparse musical arrangements. Unlike Post to Wire, The Fitzgerald is mostly acoustic, with guitars, upright bass and occasional drums accompanied here and there by piano, harmonica, lap steel and fiddle. There are just two rock numbers, both of them relatively forgettable, but more cohesive with the overall sound than on the band’s previous opus.

‘Disappeared’, meanwhile, the album’s cornerstone, is a desperately mournful tale of separation and despair, set to the most beautiful piano chords to appear on a recent pop record (outside of the afore-mentioned I am a bird now, of course). It’s almost overpowering in its sheer emotion, both sweeping and intimate. ‘Exit 194B’ is another masterpiece, a glorious country shuffle that connects the album through the characters (a bunch of young kids sharing a house - imagine flannel shirts, weed, floppy long hair and cheap booze) to the grunge and alt-rock genres. It ensures that, for all its discreet arrangements and country style, The Fitzgerald is as much a rock record as anything by Alice in Chains, Uncle Tupelo or Nirvana. It shares the same themes of loss, pain and salvation that permeated those bands’ better works, yet the intimate delivery is if possible even more arresting, even more in-your-face.

You’ve got the picture, The Fitzgerald is deeply emotional, grim and sombre, easily as dark and depressing as Neil Young ‘s Tonight’s the Night or Lou Reed’s Berlin, and as equally confessional. All three albums reveal artists opening their hearts and souls for the listener, revealing the darkest recesses of their lives and surroundings in the process. But, more so than Young’s deliriously drunken trawl and Reed’s macabre drug-fest, The Fitzgerald contains a ray of sunlight, whether it’s in ‘The Janitor’s’ tale of dogged survival, or the salvation recounted in ‘Laramie, Wyoming’. It’s no Hollywood happy end, but the last track, ‘Making it Back’, sees Vlautin sitting alone in a quiet bar in the dead of night, lucid, alive and determined to, well, “make it back”, even after all he’s seen. The quiet beauty and reflective grace of the album is intoxicating, and stays with you long after the last track has ended. Albums like The Fitzgerald are few and far-between these days. That makes it a rare treasure, but one I’m glad to share here!