Michael Hann

The most exciting band I have seen for years and years: the Murder Capital reviewed

Watching them perform was like being trapped in a small room with Pinkie from Brighton Rock — five times over

It’s entirely possible for a band to be quite the most brilliant thing in existence for the briefest of times, and for them to leave almost no trace on the world. The writer Jon Savage has been known to say that Vic Godard and the Subway Sect were the best band in the world for a few months in 1977, but that year’s mythology celebrates the Sex Pistols and the Clash. In the late 1980s, after seeing a handful of extraordinary, incandescent shows, I truly believed the House of Love would dominate rock music for the next decade. The House of Who? Quite. But I wasn’t wrong about how great they were for that short time.

So when I tell you that the Murder Capital are by an immeasurable distance the most exciting band I have seen in years and years, when I say that at the end of their Sunday-evening gig at the End of the Road festival in Wiltshire I turned to my companions and simply said: ‘WOW!’ and they said exactly the same back, when I insist that for every second of their show I felt goose-bumpily, spine-tingingly alive, you shouldn’t take it as any guarantee of permanence.

The Murder Capital come from the same Dublin scene that has already brought the world Girl Band (shouty, jarring, convinced that tunes are a bourgeois affectation) and Fontaines DC (the Strokes with an Irish accent and the centre of fervent excitement this year), and by chance their appearance at End of the Road’s smallest stage, in a rammed-to-the-gills big top, immediately followed that by Fontaines DC. And Fontaines DC were really very good: muscular and melodic, the kind of thing that hits my sweet tooth. ‘Boys in the Better Land’, especially, is a desperately appealing song, laconic and tuneful in equal part.

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