Fontaines DC
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★★
Back in 2017 Fontaines DC’s December show in Dublin was at the 300-capacity Workmans Club. Then, during a five-year growth spurt, the band released four critically acclaimed albums. Their songs, once imbued with the rain and sweat of Dublin, haunt other territories now. Come spring the group will be in Japan, Australia, and South America, followed by 24 dates in North America before they return, next summer, to Europe. Right now they’re at the mouth of the river, playing two nights at Ireland’s largest indoor venue.
Arriving on stage to the strains of Kojaque over the PA, they kick off with Romance, the title track of the album they released in August, following it with Jackie Down the Line.
[ Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC: ‘We were speeding off the edge of a cliff’Opens in new window ]
As Storm Darragh howls outside, it would be usual for frontman Grian Chatten to conjure a storm inside, with his trademark frenetic stage prowl. But here he appears relaxed, louche even, certainly focused. Televised Mind cracks the whip. A Lucid Dream creates a maelstrom in the crowd. A Palestine flag hangs near Carlos O’Connell; the band applaud when a spontaneous Free Palestine chant breaks out.
Another track from Romance, Horseness Is the Whatness, is gorgeous and shimmering, ending in a brilliant if brief avant-garde distortion. This razor-blade-in-the-bobbing-apple approach is delightfully risky. Nothing is on solid ground here. Fontaines DC are a band constantly unseating themselves, never settling into the obvious, becoming intentionally disconcerting at moments, as though setting themselves little challenges along the way to expand and twist their catalogue into a conjuring for which only they know the incantations.
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Boys in the Better Land feels like a rock classic at this stage, and both its delivery and reception are ecstatic. Favourite is another wonderful moment. They stroll off and return with In the Modern World, perhaps their finest song to date, which prompts a mass singalong.
I Love You rips through the crowd, a week after the general election, with thousands of people screaming its lyric “The gall of Fine Gael and the fail of Fianna Fáil”. The song ends with the stage bathed in Tricolour lighting for a different kind of ferocious national anthem.
This is not the same band that played the Workmans, or Vicar Street, or anywhere else they’ve been the past half-decade. This is a band constantly embracing change. Masterly, sophisticated and compelling, they clearly find that shirking the obvious is a creatively rewarding choice – ultimately, what’s the point unless things are evolving?
