Just like Joan Crawford went down the stairs of her mansion in the Billy Wilder movie sunset boulevard Fontaines DC attacked their concert on Saturday night at the WiZink Center in Madrid wrapped in sequins and gallantry from another era. That decadent atmosphere, in the best sense of this word, combines eccentricity and decline, love for a disappeared but splendid, almost anachronistic past. The secret intentions of the singer of the Irish quintet, Grian Chatten, are glimpsed when he expresses his interest in transmitting that atmosphere to the Sunset Boulevard in his new job. Only this time it is not the golden Hollywood of the 30s and 40s, but the golden period of indie music of the 90s.
Start the party with Romance, the song that gives its name to the new album, and the disturbing existentialist sadness of these twenty-something poets can already be seen. In a music industry in which guitar bands have disappeared from the public spotlight, they have produced a choral and heterogeneous work that persists in guitars and traditional independent British pop. Skinty Fia, Their previous album was already a post-punk culmination of a style that had no further scope. Romance (2024) breaks the deck and changes the usual classic line. We did not see this transformation coming and it has transformed the larva into a very successful butterfly, which surprises us by being nominated for the Grammy Awards or invited by Jools Holland for his late night.
Fontaines DC makes a stylistic bricolage of very diverse and plural influences. This is a labor of love for all the classic groups of the past, where the influences of groups from the golden era of independent music such as Pixies, The Cure or Happy Mondays are mixed with other more mainstream like Lana del Rey or Depeche Mode. The hand of producer James Ford and the excellent compositions finish supporting one of the great masterpieces of recent years, an anachronistic-conscious album, a pink and luminous delivery that breaks the band’s indie ceiling in one fell swoop, and drives it forward. to a much more ambitious territory. The risky move has robbed the bank, Romance It is a work widely acclaimed by critics and the public.
Thus, a special electricity is palpable in the atmosphere surrounding the WiZink entrances. The saviors of independent rock and roll are coming. There is a crazy desire in the Madrid audience to meet the band again, this time in a setting more in line with their notable success, with capacity for thousands of parishioners, also organized by Houston Party Music, just like in their previous concert. held two years ago in the Riviera room.
Visits to Madrid are not just any visits for the band, since guitarist Carlos O’Connell was born in this city, son of a Spanish father and Irish mother, and lived in the capital until he was 18 years old. Many of Carlos’s friends and family would be in the audience, which is sure to be very special for the guitarist. In fact, he was the first to communicate with the public: “Thank you very much, very nice.” One of the most etiquette-breaking moments of the night was when he started singing Treasures by Antonio Vega, a moment as surreal as it is emotional.
Of course, on the track there is a great mix of the group’s faithful, numerous foreign followers and also those coming from all corners of Spain, since this is the only date that passes through the country in this Romance European Tour that began on the previous in Lisbon, and that will take them for 11 more dates throughout Europe until ending on November 24 in Cardiff. A not very extensive tour, but it already has several closed dates with no tickets available. It is no wonder given the aura of saviors of rock and roll with which his name is mentioned on many occasions.
As expected, as it could not be otherwise, Fontaines DC is one of those transgenerational projects, with a very heterogeneous age spectrum among the public. The most traditional indie fiftysomethings came to the call with renewed enthusiasm, many with their children and finally seeing a band with members under 50 years old on stage. Wow, they are under 30 years old! How long has it been since we saw musicians under 30 years old on stage in a concert of these characteristics and these dimensions? It is very nice to find very young people, dressed like them, with colored hair, mixed with other older people with their Pixies or Pulp t-shirts and with jean jackets crowned by horn-rimmed glasses on their faces.
In the Fontaines DC staging, leather jackets and jeans, indie normality and rock attitude are gone. Fontaines DC looks like one of those wooden games for children in which you change the clothes piece by piece, and place them on the torso, head, legs, until a fun mess is completed. DIY also reached the band’s aesthetic with braids, highlights, leather, soccer team t-shirts, skirts, with bright and striking colors. There is a manifest intention on their part to break with the basic schemes of the macho and closed culture of rock and roll. And all this together with the aesthetics and intentions of the album, shamelessly exploding many old and outdated stereotypes of traditional indie.
A Palestinian flag hangs from the keyboard, the only flag that competes for prominence with the Irish one, which they boast about so much and which emerges all over the stage at the end of I Love You, in the middle of that tremendous finale that was the encores. Grian Gratten is not a singer with much charisma, and his shyness and coldness prevent him from having a very direct and emotional contact with the public. The strength of Fontaines DC is the rigorous technique with which the songs are executed, which sound really good, they may not be the best musicians in the world but the group is perfectly synchronized, they are a single voice, and their hieraticism plays in the same league than some The Cure for example.
Meanwhile, a silver balloon-shaped heart floats above the stage, with a very spartan decoration but very well used, with very notable effects that play with the setting of each song. Televised Mind brings more psychedelic effects, Here’s the thing It plays with different colors on the heart, and so in each song the heart seems to beat to the rhythm of the band, which little by little falls into rhythm with the vital rhythm of all the attendees, who can barely bear the emotional anxiety of ending the night with Starbusterpossibly the band’s definitive classic, a rap song that has come to revolutionize indie pop as we knew it. It is not every day that the greatness of the future is seen so clearly. It is true that Fontaines DC will become big and this concert has proven it. Hopefully when they are at the top the result will be as exciting as the path to get there.
#Fontaines #Madrid #indie #romance #year
