More about: The Murder Capital

Members of Fontaines D.C. and Shame are in attendance at the after-party for The Murder Capital’s huge Electric Ballroom show in London tonight (21 February). It’s Friday and the celebration in Quinn’s feels like more of a time out than a party - a much-needed follow-up to a show so extraordinary as to leave emotional aftershocks long after the last crackling amps were silenced.

The Murder Capital are a band of rare countenance: post-punk by way of Joy Division, their songs are full-bodied and all-encompassing, a good proportion of them slow and considered, another group faster paced but never frenetic. Live, the performance of their debut LP When I Have Fears only confirms why we named it 2019’s best album.

The group pile on stage to the song of feedback, bassist Gabriel Paschal Blake swinging his guitar like a pendulum and chiming the beginning of the show. When vocalist James McGovern arrives on stage, the crowd - a sample group from BBC Radio 6 Music’s demographic - cheer wildly, recognising the opening cramps of ‘More Is Less’.

McGovern commands the ballroom with authoritative ease, wasting no time climbing into the mosh pit and sitting on the floor in their midst. Moving carefully from that to ‘For Everything’, the band demonstrate that punk needn’t read lawlessness. Even in the blowing gales of electric noise, the effect is one of control, McGovern’s poetry a measured refrain.

In an inspired reorganisation of the setlist, The Murder Capital retain control on chest-flooding renditions of ‘Slowdance I’ and ‘Slowdance II’, McGovern enjoying a stage cigarette as he allows his bandmates to pour forth their perfect noise.

The crowd hush each other into silence to hear the wounded but beautiful ‘On Twisted Ground’, a tribute to a close friend who died by suicide. It’s a life-altering performance, the perfect moment for McGovern to deliver one of his only talks - “keep your friends close” he pleads.

Things are higher tempo again for the rest of the set, but the poignant pain of that central lament fills the veins of the final four songs, especially on the euphoric ‘Don’t Cling To Life’.

This is why we’re here. To bathe in the agonising pool of life’s many emotions - often all felt at once. As The Murder Capital pace their way to the closing feedback of ‘Feeling Fades’, many of them swirl around inside the ballroom: grief and despair mingle with euphoria and lust.

Poetic and agonising, The Murder Capital live is an astonishing full-body experience. This is the kind of show we will look back on and remember when we are old and have felt all of those emotions a thousand times over - before we are ready to die.

The Murder Capital played:

More Is Less
For Everything
Slowdance I
Slowdance II
On Twisted Ground
Green & Blue
Love, Love, Love
Don’t Cling To Life
Feeling Fades

More about: The Murder Capital