Fontaines D.C.’s eloquent motormouth of a frontman Grian Chatten probably won’t thank me for saying this, but I’d heard ‘Big’, the track which begins ‘Dogrel’ and that is their second most recent single about a half dozen times before I realised that the band I was listening to weren’t in fact Idles.
Garnering them a lot of airtime on those radio stations that feature music such as Fontaines D.C. are making, the song certainly has everything that would make you appreciate those now elder statesmen of 21st century trashpunk, and it should surprise no one that the unnerving surge of guitar fury and stream of consciousness wordplay emanating from the Bristol quartet has made itself heard as far away as Dublin, which is where Fontaines D.C. originate from. Is there a gap between the letters D and C in their chosen bandname? And are they really as good as Steve Lamacq seems to think they are? There are another ten tracks on ‘Dogrel’ to listen to.
‘Sha Sha Sha’ isn’t quite as frantic as the album opener although you’d hardly describe it as a ballad, a thudding rhythm over which Chatten declaims a lyric based on his observations of everyday life, something about a rickshaw with a flat tyre. Okay, we can always use more songs that are actually about things instead of just intangible concepts, and this continues with ‘Too Real’, where the audience is invited to leave if any of them think that things are getting a bit intense, or if Fontaines D.C. are inadvertently offending us. They aren’t, although there’s a definite ‘don’t care if you don’t actually like us very much’ thing going on and they don’t, as it’s turning out, sound very much like Idles. They are reminding me of Klaxons a bit and there are nods to one or two other noisy guitar bands present throughout ‘Dogrel’ (you can make up your own mind about who those are).
‘Roy’s Tune’ is Fontaines D.C. doing a slow number, focusing Chatten’s bellicose romanticism as it does so, and with several tracks from ‘Dogrel’ having already made their way into radio playlists I’m wondering why I hadn’t already heard ‘Chequeless Reckless’ which is every bit as definedly virulent as any of those other broadcast numbers. Continuing to not sound really very much like Idles, Fontaines D.C. then bring us to ‘Boys In The Better Land’ which you almost definitely have heard by now, the song that is propelling them into the actual mainstream and they seem aware that it’s probably their best song to date, which is why it’s the second last album track instead of the second or even the first.
When I went to begin writing this review and was doing some pre-typing research I discovered that Fontaines D.C. are now in the US, doing television appearances and playing full capacity tour shows and I’ve yet to read any other reviewer that doesn’t at least think ‘Dogrel’ is potentially an album of the year. The boys are going far, all right.