With strikingly disciplined ferocity, better melodies than the Manics, near-Teutonic efficiency and positively ballistic energy levels, it was hardly a massive shock that Franz blew the Point to shards. Though never the most authentically sweaty of rock’n’roll venues – it’s too spacious, ridiculously over-policed, and usually populated by too many ponytailed record-company execs for comfort – The Point quickly came to resemble a war zone, with thousands of exuberant devotees combining to generate a sonic hysteria of Beatlemaniac proportions. There seems no force on Earth that can stop them now: utterly in control of any form they turn their hands to, the vastness of FF’s sound is custom-designed for continent-sized mega-stadia, in much the same way that U2’s sound evolved to a point of being almost too huge and sweeping to find the venue large enough to contain it.
Of course, there’s absolutely nothing loose about Franz’s m.o.: they don’t do improvisation, opting instead for downright military, note-perfect replications of material chiefly culled for their Great Leap Forward, the recently-released You Could Have It So Much Better. They’ll never be the sort of band inclined to indulge in ten-minute free-jazz Sun Ra Arkestra-style reworkings of ‘Louie Louie’: economy rules, with hardly any excess meat on the bones. It shouldn’t have surprised anybody that the ridiculously addictive ‘Take Me Out’ provoked apparent near-orgasms in the standing sections, but for my money, ‘Fade Together’ and ‘Walk Away’ scaled the most dizzying peaks, soaring above, beyond, onward and upward. Twisted sightless wrecks of men stumbled out into the night air, gasping for breath, possibly in disbelief – meanwhile, the ladies sported cat-that-got-the-cream grins of beatific satisfaction.
If there’s a more intoxicating gig in Dublin this year or next, it’ll only be because these boys are back in town. Don’t miss ‘em.