Fontaines D.C. have always been innately concerned with a sense of place – it’s even there in the band’s name, that reference to Dublin City carried across the world. With travel broadening the mind and opening out their sound, there are hints that incoming album ‘Skinty Fia’ will look more broadly at a sense of Irishness defined not merely by one location, absorbing diasporic experiences in the process.
If that is indeed the case, then the Dome is surely the record’s spiritual home. Located above the Boston Arms – one of North London’s most historic Irish pubs – it’s also a stone’s throw away from the still-vital Irish Centre, where an emotional Ashling Murphy vigil took place mere days ago.
The band’s first London show since their epic Ally Pally stand a few months ago, it’s an intimate – by their blossoming standards – show, but one that allows the audience to get a better handle on the more visceral elements of their sound, and frontman Grian Chatten’s perpetual search for connection.
Agreeing to play the show as part of BRITs Week presented by Mastercard for War Child – a mouthful, but an undeniably wonderful cause – the set is brisk, stream-lined, and compact. There’s no support act, meaning that the audience are treated to some early Pogues cuts – a band who made this part of the world their own a few decade’s earlier – before the glaring belch of feedback ushers the Dublin group onstage.
It’s an intense, incisive performance from the off, with the band pouring full concentration on sound and composure. Grian Chatten says little, a figure of studied vehemence; guitars Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley make the most of the intimate surroundings, the violence of their sound far out-stripping the cavernous Ally Pally.
The set draws on debut album ‘Dogrel’ and excellent follow-up ‘A Hero’s Death’; familiar favourites like ‘Cha Cha Cha’ are greeted like old friends by the partisan crowd, while title cut ‘A Hero’s Death’ feels bold, vibrant. It’s curious to watch the band evolve in real-time, the brittleness of those early shows giving way to a more rounded, confident use of space; the incisive noise rock elements remain, but colour and shade have been added, to triumphant impact.
Much of the real excitement, however, lies in the new material. Incoming album ‘Skinty Fia’ follows a breathless one-two run across an 18 month span, yet all the signs are Fontaines D.C. have upped their game once more. New song ‘Roman Holiday’ is given its live debut, and it seems to find the Irish group embracing beauty, allowing light to permeate their songwriting, it only to accentuate the monochrome. A gripping performance, it raises hopes yet again for their incoming LP.
A tight, neatly defined performance, Fontaines D.C. exit stage right after 70 minutes of breathless, jet black musicality. Post-punk as a label has always felt restrictive and reductive, in places a misnomer – a band truly getting into their creative stride, tonight felt like another key moment as Fontaines D.C. leave one era behind, and ignite another.
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Words: Robin Murray
Photo Credit: Patrick Gunning
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