This World is Poison
Romantic Pessimism in The Psychedelic Furs’ Book of Days
Romanticism can be edifying: a tale of the ways of Spirit-in-the-World, elaborated in Wordsworth’s chronicles of the lake district or Caspar-David Friedrich’s exhilarated man standing on a mountaintop. But too much exhilaration usually leads to disillusion, even exhaustion, and that is also part of the Romantic legacy. Pessimism as an aesthetic position might be post-Romantic, but nothing can be “post” something without a negative and positive reference back to the “pre”. For every Keats there is a Baudelaire, for every Whitman there is a Poe.
Book of Days is a brilliant album by The Psychedelic Furs, an unfairly ignored effort by a vastly underrated band. It is a vignette of what happens when Romanticism collapses into bitterness and cynicism.
The Furs, especially its charismatic singer and frontman Richard Butler, have always manifested a thick Romantic streak in its characteristic songs about love and loss. The sunny side of the romantic sensibility dominated the album just before Book of Days, Midnight to Midnight. The latter was a radical sonic departure from their previous work. Dominated by…
