Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Five years ago, Fontaines DC set out their stall with unsmiling countenances and self-certainty. “My childhood was small,” their singer Grian Chatten sang in the opening moments of their debut album Dogrel: “But I’m going to be big.” And so it has proved. The Irish band now have four chart-topping albums under their belts, the most recent being this summer’s Romance, and are able to sell out cavernous venues such as Alexandra Palace.The 10,000-capacity hall, which they first headlined in 2021, aims to provide a music festival experience for the off-season, a place to buy gyoza from food stalls and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a rammed space without seating. On the first of Fontaines DC’s two nights there, a flare was hoisted in the audience during a song while the eh-oh’s and la-la-la’s of a festival crowd in full throat filled the air. This rough-and-tumble communal atmosphere should have suited the band’s scuffed-up anthems. But the fivesome didn’t strike me as being entirely at home on their big stage.They opened with Romance’s title track, initially silhouetted on a sheet that fell to the ground as the drums kicked in, a basic but effective piece of mass-spectacle theatre. Chatten stood with arms outstretched in rock-hero pose, wearing bug-eyed sunglasses à la Bono. Another imposing frontman, Liam Gallagher, came to mind when he sang, crossing one or both arms behind his back. But the bug sunglasses looked ungainly and his posture smacked more of diffidence than arrogance. A line from an old song, not performed tonight, came to mind: “Charisma is exquisite manipulation.” Fontaines bring a serious-minded literary sensibility to their music. They bonded as a band over a shared interest in poetry. References to James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov are scattered in their songs. The bookishness is linked to their idea of Irishness. Chatten once described Dublin, the DC of their name, as being the sixth member of the band — although it goes unmentioned in their new songs, which made up almost half the setlist at Alexandra Palace.Romance brings a more expansive dimension to their sound, tooled for the larger venues that they now command. For “Death Kink”, guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell played Nirvana-influenced riffs. “Here’s the Thing” had the loud-quiet-loud dynamics of 1990s US alt-rock. “I feel your pain, it’s mine as well,” Chatten sang in his low monotone as though reciting from a Kurt Cobain lyric generator. The chiming guitars of “Bug” — for which he removed his bug-eyed sunglasses and the smoke flare was activated in the audience — had a U2-ish cadence.These songs placed the intense, rather reserved fivesome in the generic soundworld of a big rock act. The sense of an awkward fit was inadvertently made concrete by a botched attempt to play Romance’s standout track, “Starburster”, an account of a panic attack set to a magnificently swaggering hip-hop beat. A broken synthesiser caused a seven-minute delay. The unscheduled appearance of a track from their debut album, “Too Real”, restored momentum with guitars revving like Formula One cars, O’Connell pressing a beer bottle against the neck of his instrument. Then came a successful rendition of “Starburster”. It showed that Fontaines DC deserve their place in the big time, but they didn’t quite hit the mark at Alexandra Palace.★★☆☆☆fontainesdc.com
