Gig Review: Fontaines D.C. @ Shed 6, Wellington, 29 January 2023

During a weekend where extreme weather events saw the cancellation of mid-summer gigs and events right across Aotearoa – most notably in Auckland where Elton John was (twice) cancelled and the popular Laneway Festival belatedly canned – it was of some relief that Sunday night’s Wellington leg of the Fontaines D.C. Australasian tour went ahead without any disruption.

 It helped of course, that the Irish band’s gig was scheduled at an indoor venue, Shed 6, on Wellington’s waterfront. Although to be fair, the weather in the capital city – sporadic showers – was in no way as catastrophic as the torrential rain Auckland and the far north was battered with. Flooding was so severe, a Civil Defence State of Emergency remained in place in Auckland across the entire weekend and beyond. Whisper it, but the word is, there’s more to come.

Having been relieved of Monday Laneway duties, there was a sense that the Fontaines were doubly keen to whip up a storm of their own in the capital, and that’s exactly what they achieved. With a 90-minute onslaught of pure state-of-the-art post-punk. The band reeling off a set which covered most of the key tracks from each of their three album releases to date.

There was a brief but poignant blast of Television – in tribute to the newly departed Tom Verlaine (R.I.P.) – just before the band arrived on stage, sans regular guitarist Carlos O’Connell, who is on “expectant dad” duties, replaced on this trip to the antipodes by The Altered Hours’ guitarist Cathal MacGabhann.

A terrific opening double whammy of ‘A Lucid Dream’ and ‘A Hero’s Death’, off the band’s 2020 album of the same name, set the scene rather nicely, before a run through highlights like ‘Sha Sha Sha’, ‘I Don’t Belong’, and ‘How Cold Love Is’, propelled us to something of a mid-set peak featuring a raucous ‘Televised Mind’ and ‘Jackie Down the Line’.

 Personal favourite ‘Roman Holiday’ offered another mini peak ten minutes later, by which time I’d abandoned the heaving throng closer to the stage for a sedate spot with more breathing room somewhere near the back – the venue was at about ninety percent capacity, if not fully sold out, and it was uncomfortably hot and sticky once the band were in full flight and the crowd fully engaged.

A punked-up take on ‘Nabokov’ followed, before an equally snotty version of ‘Too Real’ notionally closed the show … but you just knew there was going to be an encore, nobody was leaving, and naturally Fontaines D.C. were able to oblige with a couple of hitherto overlooked bangers in the form of Dogrel favourite ‘Boys in the Better Land’, and ‘I Love You’, off last year’s Skinty Fia album.

The band was tight throughout (makeshift guitarist and all), driven by a take-no-prisoners rhythm section, and in the form of Grian Chatten, the Fontaines have a front man who one hundred percent believes every single word he throws at you in that unmistakable and rather compelling thick Southern Irish brogue.

 Chatten kept interaction with the crowd at a minimal level (ie. barely at all) and whilst there will have been many in the crowd who prefer a band to connect with idle banter, I personally think there was enough of a stage presence about the undeniably charismatic Chatten, who bounces around not unlike a nervous child on the first day of pre-school, to still make a firm connection. And really, why bother with obligatory conventional triggers when the mostly unconventional music largely speaks for itself?

The support was provided by local indie rockers Wiri Donna, who played a short set of solid tunes from their recent EP plus the odd new track. I’d like to see them again, if only for the hugely entertaining bass player, who's in-the-moment facial expressions and (mock?) rock-star posing was a joy to behold.

Photos: Thanks to @nothingelseon for the pics.

Albums of 2020

It’s time for the annual wrap of the best new albums added to your blogger’s collection this year. There’s been a few, but I’ll choose ten for this post, and then take a look at the best of the rest, compilations/reissues, and EPs in a series of separate posts as we enter the new year. This is not so much a “best of” 2020, because I’ve no doubt I’ve missed many of the actual best albums, but more of a personal “most-listened-to” list. As ever, the only prerequisite for inclusion is that I picked up a copy of the album during the year (in any format), which does, admittedly, rule out a good number of decent albums I merely preview-streamed via Spotify and failed to follow through with.

10. The Beths - Jump Rope Gazers

2020 saw Auckland indie-pop nerds The Beths consolidate their reputation as one of the best young bands in the country. A fact confirmed when they picked up three gongs at the annual Aotearoa Music Awards. Sophomore album Jump Rope Gazers wasn’t dramatically different from the band’s debut, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. My full review is here.

9. The Phoenix Foundation - Friend Ship

Five years on from the release of Give Up Your Dreams, which for me was something close to a career high watermark for The Phoenix Foundation (and an album rated number two on this blog’s year-end list for 2015), Wellington’s most eclectic pop collective returned with Friend Ship. And while it didn’t quite scale the lofty heights of GUYD, or earlier work like Horsepower, Pegasus, or Buffalo, it was another great set from a bunch of guys who continue to poke away at boundaries without compromising their core sound. On Friend Ship we got everything from elaborate orchestral stuff - see collaborations with the NZSO - to odd psychedelic moments, proggy flavours, and more snippets of humour than you can shake a funny cigarette at. But mostly we got crafty intelligent pop music dressed in a variety of threads, and the collaborations with Hollie Fullbrook (‘Decision Dollars’, ‘Tranquility’) and Nadia Reid (‘Hounds of Hell’) were outstanding. I also really loved the pomp and swagger of ‘Guru’, the scene-setting album opener. Oddly though, given that it was one of the more high profile album takeaways, and clearly loved elsewhere, I was less taken by the faux-disco of ‘Landline’, which for me veered beyond pastiche and into the realm of just plain cheesy. But then, I’ve always struggled with irony, and it wouldn’t be a proper Phoenix Foundation album if there wasn’t at least one track that left me scratching my head. Not reviewed on the blog.

8. Murmur Tooth - A Fault in This Machine

I was heavily invested in this one during our autumn lockdown period. In my original review (here), I called it the most uneasy listening “easy listening” album you’re likely to hear all year, and nothing happened to change that view. I loved it.

7. Alicia Keys - Alicia

I’m a fan of pure unadulterated pop music, and although Alicia Keys is not usually an artist I’d necessarily gravitate towards, Alicia was an album for the ages. Socially conscious, empowering, and life affirming. My review is here.

6. Nadia Reid - Out of My Province

How could any local not love an album that opens with the line “you took me to Levin”? ... for the uninitiated, Levin is a small soulless market town, about an hour’s drive north of Wellington in New Zealand’s lower North Island, and a million miles removed from any of the romance implied on Nadia Reid’s album opener ‘All of my Love’. And coincidently, a town not a million miles away from where your blogger resides. Anyway, it’s that sense of “us” that first attracted me to Reid’s work as long ago as her Preservation album (of 2017) after overlooking far too much of her early stuff. Out of my Province was probably the biggest “grower” of this year’s bunch. After the first couple of listens I concluded it was all a bit too beige and “generic folky”, but I stuck with it, and as time passed I became far better acquainted with all of its many hidden charms. In fact, although it is only number six on this list, Out of My Province was probably the album I listened to more than any other across the full year. It just wasn’t my ultimate favourite. It helped that it was so workplace (office) compliant and I was able to spend a lot of time with it. Best cuts: ‘Best Thing’, and the silver scroll-nominated ‘Get the Devil Out of Me’. Not reviewed on the blog, which is perhaps just as well, because I feel very differently about it today than I did when I first picked it up.

5. Matt Berninger - Serpentine Prison

Another genuine grower, after curiosity got the better of me. I mean, a Matt Berninger (The National) solo work in collaboration with the great Booker T. Jones, what could possibly go wrong? Not much, evidently. My review is here.

4. The Orb - Abolition of the Royal Familia

An all new intoxicating blend of disco, deep house, ambient electronica, and skanky dub. New Orb, just like old Orb, and if there was a track that summed up the post-apocalyptic nature of 2020 better than album closer ‘Slave Till U Die No Matter What U Buy’, which appropriates Jello Biafra’s ‘Message From Our Sponsor’ spoken-word narrative, then I didn’t hear it. My review is here.

3. The War on Drugs - Live Drugs

Given that I’m going to do a blog year-in-review write-up specifically on compilations and reissues, I was tempted to save this one for that piece. A live album is a compilation by default, right? Um, I guess, but Live Drugs was just too good to ignore and there were a few occasions late in the year when I had this on repeat, so it has to qualify on my most-listened-to list instead. Way more than the sum of its parts, the album is essentially a collection of live extracts from a bunch of different gigs played in support of the band’s two most recent - and most commercially successful - albums, Lost in the Dream (2014) and A Deeper Understanding (2017). Yet it plays like it could all have been recorded at the same gig. The flow, the feels, and sense that this was, or is, a band right at the top of its game. It’s a virtual live “greatest hits”, with eight of the ten tracks coming from those two albums, including seven singles, while there’s one very early TWOD offering, ‘Buenos Aires Beach’, and a fairly choice Warren Zevon cover ‘Accidentally Like A Martyr’. I’ve never been able to put my finger on exactly what appeals most about The War on Drugs; all those classic rock touchstones - big keys, harmonica breaks, and lengthy guitar solos - and all that big Springsteen-esque Americana would usually be enough to have me reaching for the industrial-strength Nurofen, yet somehow it works. There’s some truly epic moments on Live Drugs, and highlights include wonderful versions of ‘Pain’, ‘Red Eyes’, ‘Thinking of a Place’, and ‘Under The Pressure’. No blog review.

2. Antipole - Perspectives II

If I’m going to break unwritten but notional blog rules by including live albums, then I simply have to throw in this remix album, which revisits tunes from Antipole’s 2019 album, Radial Glare. It’s a sister release for the Anglo-Norwegian dark-wavers to Perspectives (which topped this list in 2018), and it was another regular go-to album for me during the autumn lockdown period. My review is here.

1. Fontaines D.C. - A Hero’s Death

I was very slow on the uptake when it came to Fontaines D.C., somehow missing all of the initial hype surrounding the band’s debut album Dogrel (2019), before being seduced into complete and utter submission by the sheer post-punk majesty of this year’s follow-up, A Hero’s Death. I had to chuckle when I read the band’s claim in the NME, upon completion of the album in late 2019, that it “was inspired by the Beach Boys”. Yeah, only if the Beach Boys had been raised on the rain-swept streets of Dublin, consumed Guinness for breakfast, dressed entirely in black, and listened to nothing but the Velvet Underground. This is post-punk 101, 2020-style. A state-of-the-art example of raw, gritty rock n roll, propelled by big basslines, weighty guitars, and a vocalist with a thick booming Irish accent to die for. Which is more than enough, but what really gives A Hero’s Death its next level heft is its clever and artful collection of lyrics. Songs packed full of urgency, insight, irony, and humour. There’s no filler here, and tracks like ‘Televised Mind’, ‘I Don’t Belong’, ‘A Lucid Dream’, and the title track itself, would all be fully legit contenders for any notional eveythingsgonegreen tune of the year.

If there was such a thing. For now, I’ll stick to album reckons. And I’ve got no valid excuse for not giving A Hero’s Death the full review treatment on the blog. Of the ten albums covered here, four are local releases, yet I could just as easily have included a couple more (not least Darren Watson’s Getting Sober release) and I thought it was a pretty good year for homegrown stuff. More on that in my next post.

The flip side to that of course is that it was a terrible year for the local live music scene. With Covid-19, closed borders, lockdowns, and social distancing in effect for large chunks of 2020, quality live gigs were hard to come by. I can’t even really present a decent case for a gig of the year, given I attended so few. I guess it has to be The Beths at Wellington’s San Fran in October, pretty much by default. And I suppose if there was one positive to emerge from a lack of overseas touring acts, it was that local artists got more opportunities to shine as headliners when our nightlife did finally spring back into life mid-year.

Anyway, I’ll have a few more reflections on an extraordinary year over the next few weeks when I take a look at the best of the rest (albums), the best compilations and reissues, and even a post on the remarkable number of great EPs I managed to pick up during the year. In the meantime, be gone 2020. Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out …