The Dark Romantics
Heartbreaker
Lujo Records
By Jose Fritz
This is a band begging to become a reality TV show. Friends Eric Collins and Dean Paul invite their wives, Amanda and Carla Jones, who are sisters, into the band! And the drummer is named Fifi! Say no more. This couldn’t be better if all their names rhymed, or the sisters were Siamese twins. The comic possibilities are endless.
Amanda and Carla Jones are not twins, conjoined twins, fraternal twins or any other kind of Gemini pair. To their credit, their own biography steers around the whole “sisters thing.” It’s not an entirely new convention: the band VPN had the sisters Jean and Pat and the Carter family had several sisters. There are also the Lovell sisters, the Quebec sisters, The Ball Sisters, Peasall Sisters, The Loy sisters and a great number of others. (Strangely the Scissor Sisters contain no actual sisters.)
The romance in The Dark Romantics is a literary reference. It refers to the 19th century American literary genre that included both Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson, so get your head out of the gutter. There is no kinky shit to be found here. The band hails from Lakeland, Florida, a suburb with a drunk uncle’s connection to Tampa. As absurd as it may sound, that part of the Sunshine State has quite the goth-rock scene. Yes, even subtropical, sandy, citrus-ridden Florida has stinky kids with wallet chains, baggy black pants, and neck tats. She Wants Revenge are not alone in the universe.
In a way, Heartbreaker is much gloomier than the band's debut Some Midnight Kissin’, taking a step away from their previous state as the gothic answer to The Strokes. They are still dark, dramatic and mysterious, what they are not is a band of rich New York debutantes. Did I just sneak in another jib at The Strokes? Yes I did.
I get the impression they are very aware of their gothic façade. Their faux romanticism isn’t taken too far. They don’t wear grey suits with black ascots on stage. They don’t swill absinthe. They don’t quote Edgar Allen Poe and they don’t twirl glow sticks. Collis, E. Collins, and Paul used to be in the Christian rock bands Denison Mars and the John Ralston Band. Christian rock is just another set of rules, and constraints. Identities like these have a morphological quality and some rockers need to be different people onstage: Christian, goth, bolt-head, bat-fucker, hippie, stoner, greaser, metal-head —whatever. It is a mask that frees them to write brooding, morose ballads for the underground.
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