This past winter we had some work done in our furnace room in the basement that necessitated taking a jackhammer to the concrete floor. Needless to say, before work commenced everything that we had been storing in there had to be removed, a protective tarp erected to protect the furnace from dust, vents throughout our home closed off to prevent dust from ending up everywhere and so on. Then the jackhammering began. A few days later, the cleanup and restoration of that small space followed. This is where today’s music story begins.
With my wife at work, my eldest daughter off to university and my youngest daughter off to her high school classes, the job of restoring order to our basement fell to me. Tidying up after hours of breaking apart a concrete floor is a messy job. But it is a job made slightly better with music. Because I had the house to myself, I opted to crank the tunes. As for the tunes themselves, I decided to do a little research while I worked. I selected a playlist entitled The Top 100 Indie and Alternative Songs of 2024. Admittedly, I had taken my fingers somewhat off of the pulse of modern music as 2024 had unfolded so some of the songs on this playlist I had heard of but many I had not. The entire cleanup experience was going to be done to the sounds of the very best new music in the world. The very first song on that list was “Starburster” by Fontaines D.C. What a banger this song is! After pressing play and launching into my initial cleaning chores, I actually stopped in my tracks as the throbbing bass beats of this song filled my home. Then came the lyrics. What an interesting, original song “Starburster” is! The words being sung and the lyrical structure of the song were quite arresting. I was only one song into this playlist and already I had had my socks blown off. Before I say anymore about this song itself, let me tell you about the band. They are four albums into a career that has many heralding them as the best new band in the world. They are definitely a collective of like minded musicians who view the world, and their place in it, differently. So, without further delay, grab your socks and hold on tightly while I introduce you to the hottest band around, Fontaines D.C.
Fontaines D.C. is a band out of Dublin, Ireland. They formed a decade or so ago in 2014. The band consists of five friends who met while attending music school. The band members are singer/songwriter Grian Chatten, drummer Tom Coll, guitarists Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley and Conor Deegan. So far this sounds kinda like any other band but here is where their path starts to diverge. These five young men first bonded over a shared love for poetry. In fact, before ever having dreams of being in a music group, these five men published two complete books of poetry. It is very instructive to examine this in order to understand why they write the songs they do and why they perform them in the style that they are becoming known for. These two books of poetry were inspired, first of all, by the Beat Poets such as Jack Kerouac. As you may know, Jack Kerouac became noted for a stream-of-consciousness style of writing where words, thoughts and feelings come at the reader/listener like bullets from a gun. The second book of poetry published by the members of the band was inspired by a style of Irish poetry called Doggerel or street poetry or poetry of the common man. Poets such as Ogden Nash helped make this style of writing famous. Thus, when you listen to the music that Fontaines D.C. started to produce, much of it has Kerouac’s staccato delivery style which makes many songs sound like they are more like spoken word than actual singing. In addition, much of Fontaines D.C.’s lyrical content reflects issues embedded into the culture and history of Ireland. These issues are explored in very poetic and descriptive terms. Finally, because of a love of language that all five band members possess, many of their songs use words as more than mere words. By this I mean that they use words to describe ideas by having the way they use words act as the idea itself. “Starburster” is a perfect example of this, as you shall soon see. It should come as no surprise that their debut album was called Dogrel, after that style of poetry that is so infused into their music. Dogrel was nominated for Album of the Year after it debuted.
The band took their name from the movie The Godfather and from their home in Dublin. In The Godfather, there is a character named Johnny Fontane. Johnny Fontane is a singer (some say modelled after Frank Sinatra) who is the godson of Don Vito Corleone, head of the Corleone crime family. The “D.C.” part of the band’s name stands for Dublin City, which served as their home base growing up. Thus, the very name of the band draws upon cinematic and cultural historic roots that are foundational elements of how the band members view their place in the world. I first became aware of the band during the COVID pandemic. Fontaines D.C. was one of the first bands to hop on the “home concerts” bandwagon. They released several videos of songs from their second album called A Hero’s Death that all possessed elements of a Zoom-style video conference. The first song of theirs that I heard was the title track. *(You can listen to “A Hero’s Death”…pandemic style… here.) This song is half rap/half spoken word poetry, all wrapped up in a musical sound that had many people comparing them to bands such as Joy Division and Grian Chatten to late singer Ian Curtis. The song itself is a recitation of character traits that we should all possess if we are hoping to live a good life and have a positive impact on others. When I first heard it, the lyrics resonated with me because I believe in possessing good character and having integrity, too. Needless to say, my discovery of Fontaines D.C. during the COVID lockdowns was one of the happier things to arise for me out of that, otherwise, bleak situation.
By the time it came for album number three, the band faced a crossroads. It was the same sort of crossroads that many bands face. It is the question of whether they should stay in their musical lane and simply reproduce more songs that remind fans and record executives of their past hits or should they follow their artistic muse and evolve as a band, even if that takes them in a new direction that may alienate them from their fans. The boys in Fontaines D.C. opted for the latter. Their third album was called Skinty Fia. The term skinty fia is derived from the Gaelic/Irish language and is a putdown that translates into something close to “The damnation of the deer”. This phrase is a throwback to the extinct Irish elk. The Irish Elk is extinct now but there is a thriving black market that trades in Irish elk bones. Thus, the album cover and the video for the title track both prominently feature a deer meant to represent threats to Irish culture from external forces (i.e., England and colonialism and from capitalism). If you know anything about Irish history, you will be aware of the enormous influence colonialism has had on the Irish. It is interwoven with many aspects of daily life and has come to be a cultural and historical element of Irish society, in and of itself. *You can watch the video for the song “Skinty FIa” here. Of note, there are many people, myself included, who say that the scene depicted in this video directly inspired the birthday party scene in the 2023 hit movie Saltburn. *(I wrote a post about that movie that you can read here. *The birthday party scene from Saltburn can be viewed here.) One of the key points of that comparison is that one of Saltburn’s main premises was a disregard for the importance of culture and of history. Fontaine’s D.C., on the other hand, announced with Skinty Fia that they were preparing to up the ante in their promotion of their core values, one of which was their pride in being Irish and their belief that the subjugation of Irish culture by the English was something worth talking about and rebelling against. In a move that was to have enormous political ramifications in the years to come, Fontaines D.C. decided to direct a portion of the proceeds from all concerts in support of the Skinty Fia album to the charity organization known in english as Doctors Without Borders in order to help them in their efforts to help Palestinian refugees in Gaza. In discussing the rationale behind this, Fontaines D.C. stated that the Irish people feel a kinship to their Palestinian brothers and sisters because, like the Irish over history, the Palestinians face cultural extinction, too, due to external forces impacting their lives.
This past year, Fontaines D.C. released their fourth album which was called Romance. This brings us back to the song “Starburster”. As mentioned throughout this post, the boys from Fontaines D.C. are a cerebral lot. They don’t just write songs with a message in the lyrics, they are now writing songs in which the structure of the lyrics is also part of the message. A case in point is “Starburster”. By now, Fontaines D.C. was becoming one of the biggest bands in the world. Accompanying their rise to the top have come a lot of things that were not originally part of their artistic vision. This includes everything from the attention that fame brings, the loss of privacy, the constant examination and dissection of the band and their music and personalities found in social media, the access to material wealth, the opportunities to give into temptation, as well as that sense of responsibility that the band feels to use their platform to give voice to the oppressed and to promote their own culture as a nation. That is a lot to deal with for anyone. So, the story goes that as the songs were being written for the Romance album, Grian Chatten was feeling at odds with the material the band had come up with so far. Chatten, who takes medication to help him control AD/HD and reduce the onset of panic attacks, actually had a panic attack in a train station on the way to the recording studio. Feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, Gratten internalized his thoughts and feelings. Once the panic attack had subsided, he put those thoughts down on paper to the fullest extent he was capable of. The result was “Starburster”. This is a song that acts as a musical expression of what an active panic attack is like. I have never experienced that so I can’t vouch for the validity of that statement but I can attest to the fact that this song really stands out as something unique and different from the standard radio fare that one hears these days. First of all, the song is a real banger. There is a thumping, throbbing baseline that drives this song forward. As you hear the intensity of the bass, picture the intensity of a heart beating during a real panic attack. But the song doesn’t begin immediately with the explosive baseline. Instead, it begins with a sense of foreboding as piano keys tinkle and Chatten mouths the lines “It may be bad” over and over again. The foreboding notes yield to the full on sonic assault and the attack begins. The lyrical content sweeps over a vast smorgasbord of items, issues and personalities that all work to showcase the ferocity of the thoughts going through the mind of someone undergoing a panic attack. About two thirds of the way through the song, a musical bridge appears to bring a sense of calmness and tranquility to the scene, only to have it all rev up again in a cataclysmic conclusion that makes the statement that finding themselves as they once were may never be something the band members in Fontaines D.C. will ever have the luxury of enjoying again. The refrain of “I’m gon’ hit your business if it’s momentary blissness, uhh!” hits on repeat, acting as a threat which ends up taking us out of the song. All throughout the song’s structure, there are moments included that sound like grunting, which are meant to symbolize the breathlessness that comes with a panic attack. All in all, “Starburster” is a panic attack reconstructed in music notes, gasped breaths and the words of a man struggling to continue to see himself as he truly is in a world seemingly bent on deconstructing his authentic self image from the world.
It is no wonder that many fans and critics voted “Starburster” as the Song of the Year in 2024 and why they state with conviction that Fontaines D.C. is the best band on the planet at this moment in time. It is also no wonder why the song stopped me in my tracks as I began my cleaning chores that winter’s day. As I cleaned up the dust and debris of our small construction project, I did so to the sound of a band that wants us to look at the world around us and strive for something better for us all. They are a band who is using their own artistic sense of expression as a means for advocating for the right of self-expression for others who are unable to advocate for themselves. And they are doing so with a sense of musical inventiveness that is rare these days. I applaud their humanitarian efforts and their willingness to reinvent themselves into better versions of the people they wish to be. What a particularly want you to know, dear reader, is that Fontaines D.C. are doing all of this while still producing music that is, at turns, incredibly enjoyable to listen to as pure art while, at the same time, uplifting an entire art form in the process by the intelligence of their song construction and the messages contained within. Well done, all. I look forward to seeing what the future brings for this important band. I hope that all of you who are reading this post take a few moments to get to know Fontaines D.C., too. I think you’ll be better for the experience.
The link to the video for the song “Starburster” by Fontaines D.C. can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.
The link to the official website for Fontaines D.C. can be found here.
The link to the official website for the humanitarian organization Medecins des Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders can be found here should you wish to know more about their mission work in Gaza.
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