While Sunday’s weather was anything but cheery as rain and wind battered the Welsh capital, a sold-out crowd braved the elements and packed the arena to the brim. It’s no surprise either that Fontaines D.C. have grown steadily over the last few years, but the latest album, Romance, has accelerated this growth even further. Once inside, fans will have been greeted with the appearance of a huge silver sheet blocking out the stage. An age-old stage trick, but one deployed to great effect.
Anticipation loomed as the giant curtain hiding the stage became inhabited by the shadowy silhouettes, and as the new album’s titular track boomed around the arena the curtain glowed a bright shade of green before dropping to reveal the band in their entirety. Time was of the essence and the band quickly burst into fan-favourite ‘Jackie Down The Line’, with a choir of seven thousand or so joining in.
While the new album might have been a staggering success for the band, previous material was not abandoned, with both ‘A Lucid Dream’ and ‘Televised Mind’ early features of the set, as were ‘Roman Holiday’ and ‘Big Shot’. Each song’s conclusion saw frontman Grian Chatten throw his arms up to incite the Welsh crowd further.
Those who have seen the band before will already know that Chatten can be a man of very few words on stage, but his overall showmanship is perhaps the best it’s ever been, consistently storming around the stage and wrestling with his mic stand. Some bands and lead singers shrink as they make the leap to headlining arenas, but there seems to be no such issue for Fontaines and Chatten.
As the set continued, the crowd was able to shake off that rain-soaked chill and get more involved. Perhaps in no more in song than on the band’s famous ‘Boys In The Better Land’, which saw a huge mosh envelope the centre of the arena’s crowd. But while many of the old favourites received great reactions from the crowd, none were as good as the reactions that the band’s newer material such as ‘Favourite’, ‘Bug’, and ‘In The Modern World’ received. An entire crowd singing in unison must have felt ethereal for the band, a well-earned reward for their years of hard work.
The penultimate song came in the form of ‘I Love You’, the band’s very own love letter to their home country, before finishing on the abstract and wonderful ‘Starburster’. It was a rather energetic end to the show, which perhaps would’ve suited the opening position better, but nonetheless it went down a storm.
Fontaines D.C.’s latest Cardiff stint was complete, and with their date in Cardiff Castle already on sale for next summer there seems to be no slowing down by the boys from Dublin. In terms of their live performance, the band are perhaps at the best they’ve ever been and with their first UK arena headliner tour coming to a close this week, and with some huge outdoor shows lined up for next year, it seems inevitable that very soon they’ll be headlining some of the biggest festivals in the country.
