SXSW Music Review: Fontaines D.C.

Pity the band that has to follow the Ezra Collective. The young London quintet of hard-hitting Afro-jazzers harnesses the instrumental gusto to emasculate any band in its wake. Still – somehow – Fontaines D.C. were the group who blew everyone’s minds on Tuesday night.

Kicking off their first official showcase, the five Irish lads took the stage to a capacity crowd at Latitude 30, ever the British Music Embassy during South by Southwest, and rolled into “Chequeless Reckless,” with frontman Grian Chatten delivering the set’s intellectually viscous opening salvo:

“A sell-out is someone who becomes a hypocrite in the name of money/ An idiot is someone who lets their education do all of the thinking/ A phony is someone who demands respect for the principles they effect/ A dilettante is someone who can't tell the difference between fashion and style.”

You’ll notice that doesn’t exactly rhyme. Some of Chatten’s lines do, but rarely in a traditional A-B-A-B structure. Also, he doesn’t sing.

Instead, his ruthlessly poetic prose springs forth in bursts of spoken vocals that occasionally sound like Public Image Ltd.-era Johnny Rotten doing slam poetry. With drill-pressed prosody and unusually lyrical patters, it’s a delivery both primitive and novel.

Meanwhile, his stage persona employs a series of nervous ticks: anxiously picking his teeth, scratching his short brown hair, and shaking his lands like they just got slammed in a door. Chatten balks at the mic so frequently that you never know when he’s about to drop his next psyche plumbing verse or yield to his bandmates’ brand of drum-heavy post-punk with locomotive energy.

Guitarist Carlos O’Connell pushed the action, jumping up on the crowded bar and repeating a slippery, distorted lick, while Chatten stared dead-eyed at the audience, heaving forth the heavy language of “Hurricane Laughter,” commencing in the disenchanted refrain, “And there is no connection available.”

It took 31 minutes for a mosh pit to break out. The crowd had been stationary all night, calmly attentive to the impressive indie-pop song craft of Soak, the furious street jazz of Ezra Collective, and later for noise rock teens Black Midi. When a growing mass of bodies began bouncing around the dance floor, the mistrust Chatten had been eyeing the audience with washed away.

Over the dive-bomb power chord slides of “Too Real,” the 23-year-old frontman questioned, “Is it too real for ya?” No, it was just right. The Dubliners’ drone-and-moan style remaining at peak performance though catchy closer “Boys in the Better Land,” also arriving on April’s Partisan-issued Dogrel .