Album Review: Richmond Fontaine You can't go back if there's nothing to go back to

Released 20 years on from their 1996 debut, Safety, this is the tenth and final album from acclaimed US alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine. With frontman Willy Vlautin concentrating on his increasingly successful literary career in recent times, not to mention playing guitar and songwriting with musical side project The Delines, it’s also their first full release since 2011’s experimental The High Country.
Recorded and produced in Portland, Oregon by John Askew at Flora Studios, You Can’t Go Back... features the stalwart line-up of Sean Oldham on drums, Dan Eccles on guitar, and Paul Brainard on pedal steel. As ever, they’ve invited some friends over: Freddy Trujillo joins on bass from The Delines, Jenny Conlee of The Decemberists plays keyboards, and former RF bassist Dave Harding contributes some guitar.
The melancholic mood is set with slow opening instrumental ‘Leaving Bev’s Miners Club At Dawn’. According to Vlautin, he wrote these songs “to give an end piece for all the characters who inhabited the world of Richmond Fontaine over the years.” Fans familiar with the band’s back catalogue will certainly recognise some of these luckless drunks, drifters, petty criminals and minimum wagers, but You Can’t Go Back... works as a standalone album.
There are no happy endings here. A chronicler of blue collar America in the same vein as Springsteen, Waits or Reed, he’s no sentimentalist. “It got to where she couldn’t stand our place/ It got to where she cringed at the way that I slept and ate,” recalls the titular antihero of ‘Wake Up Ray’. “I can’t believe it’s true/ You’re fucking that guy you used to”, a cuckolded lover wails on ‘Two Friends Lost At Sea’. More than once, the narrator of ‘I Got Off The Bus’ has cause to sing the alarming refrain, “I woke up to see/ a policeman standing over me.”
This isn’t Richmond Fontaine’s best album – check out 2004’s Post To Wire or 2007’s Thirteen Cities – but it’s still a fine swansong from one of the greatest alt-country bands ever to emerge from the US.

Olaf Tyaransen // Out Now