Echo & The Bunnymen
The Fountain - OCEAN RAIN
FILTER Grade: 76%

There’s a fountain in Gubbio, Italy, called the Fontana dei Pazzi, and it’s said that if you run three times around it, you become a lunatic. It might have behooved Echo & the Bunnymen to have taken the pilgrimage before recording The Fountain, as what is missing, above all, is the madness. With the sugar-spinning John McLaughlin at the controls, Echo has, in fact, made the record that Coldplay always thinks it’s making. The Fountain is replete with shimmering, flaw-repellant pop, all glorious melodies and gorgeous atmospherics; and while Will Sargent’s feral guitar hounds are kept tightly leashed, Ian McCulloch rattles off couplets (“I love that sweet sack you’re in/I love that you’re from Turin”) and takes us to dizzying heights of piercing sadness and grown-up romantic longing. McCulloch was once, and yet again, our reliably debauched savior—the Liverpool punk who was nothing less than Jesus Christ newly embodied to his misfit, heathen followers. But it was always McCulloch writhing on his knees. “I’m just counting/The dreams that are lost,” he now sighs wearily on the lavishly melancholy title track. Please, it’s time to bring on the new messiah.