After an unfortunate case of laryngitis canceled their previous Boston performance, Dublin artists Fontaines D.C. are finishing their second US leg in support of their third record, Skinty Fia, at Boston’s House of Blues. Since their debut with 2019’s Dogrel, named after a variant of poetry of the Irish youth, the band have surfed a wave of popularity driven by the unfettered expansion of post-punk on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. After dates in support of Idles, then headlining smaller US venues such as Boston’s well-loved and dearly-departed Great Scott, the headlining tour for Skinty Fia finds them filling vast rooms across the nation of their own accord.
The band comes onstage to the distinctive synth intro of Primal Scream’s ‘Kill All Hippies’, perhaps one of the best album openers of all time. Some of the band, including singer Grian Chatten and bassist Conor Deegan III, have roses in hand, which after Chatten feints throwing all of them out to the crowd at once, tosses them one by one to fans, including some holding a sign together that says “Girls in the Better Land”, a play on their ‘Boys’ tune of a similar name. Chatten in particular appears fired up, immediately whipping his microphone stand into the air as if he’s not about to tolerate its immobility. He has three monitor wedges around his starting position, but he’s off like a shot around the stage to the opening beats of ‘A Lucid Dream’, prowling around like the cat in the lyrics, occasionally returning to walk a half-circle over those oddly-shaped speakers. In their catalog it’s one of the songs best suited to deliver a frantic opening, its wordy verses sometimes rushing to squeeze all the thoughts in, drummer Tom Coll playing at a hurried pace as Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley conjure noisy guitar lines atop it all.
The rush continues into the second song, ‘Hurricane Laughter’, a Dogrel highlight that’s even more relentless than the previous, with guitar and bass seemingly fighting each other for control of the song’s cadence until the lead guitar weaves in and spins the whole scene around in a tempest of polyrhythms. Chatten is almost perpetually in motion, to stay still he has to come to rest with both arms locked tight at the elbow around his mic stand firmly planted into the ground, as if he’d be carried away if he didn’t maintain such a rigid pose in those moments. The first song from Skinty Fia appears four songs into the night. Chatten’s poetry across many songs here tackles the notion of Irish identity outside of the Republic, with ‘Roman Holiday’ in particular focusing on his residence in London. It’s also one of the songs on the album that plays most heavily with a different style of production and instrumentation, Chatten’s voice layered in faraway reverb and even the guitars sounding distant, making the song thematically cohesive.
The pace finally shifts around this point in the set, with ‘I Don’t Belong’, the opener from their sophomore album A Hero’s Death. This change in BPM leads well into the live debut of ‘Bloomsday’, which features Chatten on acoustic guitar, something rarely seen in a Fontaines set, the only other example perhaps being performances of ‘The Couple Across the Way’, a personal rumination on the longevity of relationships that in their NPR Tiny Desk Concert saw Chatten also playing the accordion part. Though ‘Bloomsday’ is quite personal in nature, the title references a holiday commemorated in June to celebrate the life of Irish author James Joyce, whose poetry was one of the things over which the five members of Fontaines D.C. bonded in the first place as students.
The midsection of the night is a tour through some of the best material the band has crafted across their three records thus far. ‘Chequeless Reckless’ finds them utilizing vocal harmonies that they’d come to employ more later, ‘Nabokov’ has its almost shoegaze-indebted wall of sound that sees Curley letting ferocious guitar strikes ring out, and ‘Televised Mind’ is one of the prime examples of Chatten’s ability to build a song anchored around a repeated mantra. Chatten thanks the crowd for coming before they play ‘How Cold Love Is’. They cheer loudly, many in the area having waited for nearly an additional half-year for the band to return to Boston. The song itself parallels love with the bliss and subsequent withdrawal of any addiction, the implication of an upswing being that it creates the possibility of a crash down in its absence.
The crowd is absolutely wild by the time the night starts to near its conclusion, and ‘A Hero’s Death’ sees people young and old colliding in the center of the room to Chatten’s refrain of, “Life ain’t always empty.” Though the relentless positivity of the song is of dubious sincerity, a kind of amalgamation of sloganeering both technically true yet platitudinous, that one lyric, in particular, is genuinely undeniable at the moment watching from the balcony as singing, smiling faces circle one another. Fittingly enough, they close this portion of the night with the title track of Skinty Fia, another sonic experiment much like ‘Nabokov’ that finds the band playing in a way that evokes some dark miasma tracing the bounds of some dysfunctional relationship.
Despite the wealth of highlights in the main set, the most thrilling portion of the evening is yet to come with a final pair of songs, one each from the band’s first and most recent album. ‘Boys in the Better Land’ – heralded earlier by that sign, is Dogrel’s youthful, aspirational height; jangly, restless, and set amid the tension between Ireland and England, home versus the allure of what might lie beyond. And what follows, ‘I Love You’, is perhaps the harshest the band has ever trained its gaze at anything, an absolutely blistering stream of consciousness where Chatten confronts the horrors that have underpinned the history of his home country.
While the appeal of Fontaines DC is immediately apparent on a listen to any of their albums or attendance at their live shows, somewhat surprising is just how much American audiences have grafted onto the narratives that describe the state of contemporary Ireland. Chatten’s lyrics have often included dismal scenes, like men slumped asleep, “on the nod” in phone booths – both there and in North America there seems to be a growing dread and realization of the lack of opportunities open to the youngest generations in the wake of decades of grift and profiteering by the previous ones. It’s a crisis of purpose and of hope, a current moment surrounded by a history of atrocity and a future of suicidality among young men. “This island’s run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws,” Chatten declares, and his desperate cry of “Would I lie?” calls back to Nick Cave’s closing wail in ‘The Mercy Seat’. Chatten’s love for Ireland is foundational, but that love too can turn cold in the face of harsh reality; it’s the exploration of this tension, on scales of all sizes, that has made Skinty Fia yet another gem in the band’s body of work.
Fans waiting for Fontaines D.C. to appear were also treated earlier in the night to a set from Wunderhorse, a four-piece project of Londoner Jacob Slater. Slater’s previous project, Dead Pretties, has all of three songs on streaming services hailing from 2017, with Wunderhorse having already eclipsed that. In fact, they’re set to do so even further that very night, with the release of their debut record Cub, making this tour-ending night even more special for them.
Their set is a thoroughly successful introduction to the group, with songs that run the gamut from psych-influenced cuts like ‘Butterflies’ to more fiery post-punk, one early in the night beginning with a tender interpolation of ‘Over the Rainbow’ that flashes brightly into a full-bodied rocker as Slater leaps into the air. His elastic voice suits everything he puts it to, including the bouncily-syncopated ‘Leader of the Pack’ and arguably the best track from Cub, ‘Teal’, whose tragic story finds him at his most raw and emotive. Wunderhorse’s set ends as Slater calls out in a raspy scream multiple times, a climactic moment that more than suggests the band as artists fit to follow as they offer their first full work to the world.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
