Having spent the last couple of years recalibrating their rowdy sound with the help of studio trickery, post-punk quartet Gilla Band’s third studio album, Most Normal, announces itself with the screeching feedback and clanky guitars of “The Gum.” “I was queueing at the sockets,” bellows Dara Kiely, his voice strangled and distorted by layers of effects, briefly emerging from the industrial noise backdrop before being devoured by it again.
While the Irish noise merchants formerly known as Girl Band previously captured their exhilarating racket by simply setting up and hitting record, the pandemic gave them ample opportunity to rewrite, restructure, and dabble in sampling and other more hands-on production techniques inspired by contemporary hip-hop. The claustrophobic drums-and-vocals minimalism of “Eight Fivers” is dotted with ferocious blasts of bass and guitar, sure to convince more than a handful of gearheads to spend a few extra bucks on a new boutique pedal. Meanwhile, Kiely’s sneer recalls Mark E. Smith’s spiteful, one-note speak-singing as he vents about the drudgery of shopping while poor: “I went to Aldi, I went to Lidl, I went to JC’s.”
The band’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics lyrics lament the petty frustrations of modern life, from fast fashion (“I spent all my money on shit clothes”) to budget air travel (“I didn’t read the small print, I hate Ryanair”), but also indulge in pure abstraction. “Never flowering from a life bulb shark/Said blind luck is my look, I’m happy in the dark,” Kiely sings on the cryptic “The Weirds,” backed by a throbbing bassline and a nauseating digital drone. The band’s blend of the mundane, bleak, and darkly comic carries the DNA of fellow Irishmen James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as well as the cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs.
But Gilla Band’s gift for conjuring up new forms of auditory mayhem is the real star of the show on Most Normal, which darts between the white-noise hailstorm of “Backwash,” the distortion-bruised dreaminess of “Gushie”—whose suffocatingly loud ending cribs from Dinosaur Jr.’s “Tarpit”—and the buzzsaw dance-punk of album closer “Post Ryan.” The group’s unorthodox approach to musicianship is pushed to further extremes throughout the album, though drummer Adam Faulkner’s precise, Hugo Burnham-inspired playing is the notable exception. Guitarist Alan Duggan and bassist Daniel Fox’s deskilled pranksterism strip these fragmented tunes of immediate approachability while imbuing them with endless chaotic abandon.
Most Normal is a work of defiant, purposeful weirdness, and even when glimmers of pop prettiness do occasionally shine through, like during the opening moments of “Almost Soon,” they’re eventually buried under savage bursts of dissonance, melted psychedelia, and vocals that oscillate between the in-your-face and eerie detachment. Aside from sludge rock veterans like Cherubs or fellow experimentalists like Lightning Bolt, it’s hard to think of another act capable of creating such daringly deranged slabs of noise.
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