Richmond Fontaine.

Lev 2 Esquires Bedford. 15th October 2005.

Alt Country is not a particular area of musical interest for me to say the least, so when I nipped upstairs in Esquires mid-stag night just to check out Richmond Fontaine I was only planning to stay for a couple of songs before rejoining my fellow drunken idiots.

That plan didn’t really transpire, and as they finished their encore I still felt I shouldn’t really be there, but it was nothing to do with the style of music this time. More like the feeling you’d probably have if you’d just spent an hour and a half watching someone being pulled from a car wreck, or the aftermath of a carpet bombing, then realised you’d loved every minute of it.
The previous night I’d been watching a rare episode of The Simpsons that I’d never seen before, where Lisa enters this Pop Idol-esque talent show and realises the only way she can win is to break the hearts of the audience, so she gets on the stage and the they stand there in silence, transfixed while she warbles away about her cat that died on Christmas Eve.
And this is about where Richmond Fontaine have realised their perfection; everything about them is touching, eerie, despairing, beautiful, bleak and timeless all at once, not only lyrically but musically too, particularly in the meticulous, melancholic guitar work. And far from being depressing, it’s almost spiritual, probably akin to an out-of-body experience, when mid-song you suddenly come to your senses and realise they’d just completely transported your mind to some Southern American bayou or desert or creek, where the body of this young guy is half buried in the sand in front of you, and you’re wondering why, amidst his destruction, he has a smile on his face.