romance: fade into you

Love is dissolved into gooey pink syrup on Romance's debut album proper, a melodramatic smudge of dream pop, Hollywood glam and power ballads that gurgle n fizz thru yr emotional veins. Stunning gauzy bliss, highly recommended if yr feeling Malibu/DJ Lostboi x OPN's 'Eccojams’ x Stars of the Lid x Pinkcourtesyphone. In the glistening wake of that cult Celine Dion tribute and a couple of collaborative albums with Lynch sound designer Dean Hurley, Romance diverts their attention to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s acidic ’75 melodrama ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’, turning it into a symphonic rumination on love and decayed glamour. The film’s unforgiving dissection of a toxic relationship between a haughty fashion designer and a beautiful but icy ingenue makes use of elegant surfaces to hide tooth-and-claw instincts, a thing Romance conveys thru a palette of smeared-mascara strings and aqueous synths expressively painted to canvas with an ineffably poignant storytelling style. Heart-in-mouth with a sense of nostalgic longing, ‘Fade Into You’ dwells in a half light shared with Oneohtrix Point Never’s Eccojams and the fantasy glamour of Pinkcourtesyphone with its richly transportive melancholy. The emotive signposts of cinematic soundtracks are refracted through a hall-of-mirrors that also reminds us of Brian Eno’s 'Discreet Music' with its long, phased strings slowly criss-crossing into a pitched-down voice. Elsewhere, 'Golden Slumbers' turns evocative music hall woodwind into a sensual soundscape that's not a million miles from Jake Muir's bathhouse experiments, breathing its fictile tones quietly into the moonlight, before waking you from its dreamtime spell with 'Lonely Life’s soup of gaseous ambience.