Fontaines D.C. played Roadrunner – 10/13
Irish post-punks Fontaines D.C. headlined a sold-out Roadrunner with support from NYC’s Been Stellar.
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In some sense, it feels like just yesterday that Fontaines D.C., scrappy upstart poets of the ever-fertile overseas post-punk scene, were packing in a few hundred folks at Great Scott on their first big U.S. tour. It was September of 2019 and the band was supporting their great debut LP Dogrel in front of a buzzing crowd eager to catch a first glimpse. Given everything that wound up happening in the interim, I guess that also feels like an extremely long time ago.
A lot can change in 5 years, for the world and for a band, and the Fontaines who took the stage to a triumphant hero’s welcome at Roadrunner last Sunday had indeed come a long way from the beer-soaked push-pit at Great Scott. August’s Romance doesn’t exactly jettison the gothic gloom and urgent grit of the band’s previous three records (its opening title track, which also kicked off the show, nods aggressively towards early Bad Seeds), but it does welcome in a swirl of anthemic alt-rock here and a shade of Britpop sheen there. It’s undoubtedly their biggest-sounding project yet, and fittingly, it also has them playing their biggest North American rooms thus far.
Silhouettes, smoke and high drama beckoned from the set’s start at Roadrunner, signaling a version of Fontaines ready to lean into their increasingly high profile. Singer Grian Chatten has been honing his frontman chops throughout the ascent, and exhibited a commanding presence atop the thunderous rumble of the band – expanded to a six-piece to accommodate the textural depth of the new songs without sacrificing the charge of earlier ones. Boston happened to fall towards the end of this run of U.S. dates, and we definitely got a locked-in, all-cylinders-firing set that made a great catalog sound even better.
“Romance” gave way to 2022-highlight Skinty Fia‘s lament “Jackie Down the Line” to start the night, followed by a driving “Televised Mind” from sophomore effort A Hero’s Death in an effective engineering of dynamics characteristic of the rest of the set. Just a small handful of the punchy tunes played on the other side of Allston way back when made the cut this time, but “Big” and “Boys in the Better Land” punctuated just where they needed to. And the band saved “Starburster,” Romance‘s big-swing lead single, for the climactic last song of the night. Between Chatten’s anxious delivery of the verses and its gasping, panic-attack chorus, it’s a gutsy choice for something of a new signature song. Judging by the sold-out crowd of thousands shouting it all back to them though, that call and plenty of others are working out just fine for Fontaines.
Check out a gallery of the set below, including some shots of moody, post-punk-gaze openers Been Stellar.
