THE MURDER CAPITAL
Yes, Manchester, October 18
Urgent post-punk newcomers from Dublin incite scenes of cathartic release
THE Murder Capital and their feverish fans are crammed into a room no larger than a village hall. The stage is so small that when singer James Mcgovern steps onto the monitors to survey proceedings, he can place a hand on the ceiling to steady himself. A succession of fans are carried over the audience’s heads onto the stage, one of them virtually upside down so only his flailing boots are visible. Eventually the singer joins in, still singing as he is his carried aloft.
The Murder Capital have already outgrown their current surroundings. Their rise has been so meteoric that a tour of much larger venues has already been booked for the spring. As recently as early 2018, Mcgovern was an unknown singer-songwriter; 18 months on, he fronts a blistering live act whose recent debut, When We Have Fears, made the UK Top 20 and Ireland’s Top 5.
The quintet met at college in Dublin and have emerged from the city’s fertile new punk scene that has spawned Strokesy types Fontaines DC and the noisier Girl Band, among others. They’re all postpunk, of sorts. The Murder Capital channel decades of the genre from Killing Joke to Idles, and are distinctly darker than their peers. Mcgovern has described his band as a “reflection on something that happened”, a friend’s suicide the trigger for the singer to channel his anguish and fury into songs confronting grief, anxiety, the lack of mental health care, societal breakdown, our “frail democracy” and the current atmosphere of existential unease. Their music is both startling and liberating in its intensity.
Unusually for a young band, The Murder Capital have already grasped the power of controlling and steadily unleashing tension rather than piling in. The drama begins before they play a note. Bassist Gabriel Paschal Blake strides out and stares at the crowd before holding his instrument high, like a bayonet. Blake’s mournfully melodic basslines are pivotal, but then so are Diarmuid Brennan’s staccato Joy Division drumbeats or Cathal
Roper and Damien Tuit’s piercing guitar lines. Brooding openers “Slow Dance” I and II have an atmosphere of unknowable foreboding, like a séance. Then Mcgovern says, “This is for everyone we wish could be here”, by way of an introduction to the gently beautiful “On Twisted Ground”, a song that confronts loss. Thereafter, the 55-minute performance cranks up the intensity notch by notch. Brennan’s insistent drum motif and Mcgovern’s mournful baritone power the bleakly catchy “Green & Blue”, inspired by the lonely beauty in the work of photographer Francesca Woodman, who took her own life aged 22. “Don’t Cling To Life” celebrates life’s transient beauty (“Let’s dance and cry/remember why we die”) and finds the mostly crop-haired, besuited quintet at their most urgently danceable. By now Blake is skipping about with his bass and Mcgovern yells, “Manchester, we want more!” – the cue for the crowd to sing the mantra-like “More Is Less” along with him. These songs seem to be hitting home because they empathise with widespread feelings of disquiet and frustration, but are also clearly a cathartic joy to hear and sing. It’s been turbulent and emotional, but The Murder Capital leave an audience in Manchester looking very happy.
Their music is both startling and liberating in its intensity