Gilla Band: Most Normal – review – ALBUM OF THE WEEK!

Gilla Band: Most Normal – album review.

(Rough Trade)

Out October 6th available here

DL | LP | CD  

Gilla Band remain one of the finest groups to emerge out of a generation obsessed with, blessed, and possessed by, a certain raging noise. Entirely their own to build, entirely their own to break. By Ryan Walker.

Never exactly no wave or precisely post-punk or finitely indie because there is no longer enough safety (has there ever been without the baggage of boredom that comes nestled in such defiant taglines and terms?) in things that are precise, or finite. Yet Gilla band brands us, break us, rebuilds us, by branching out into something else, something higher, something heavier. As put into practice on their monstrous new album on Rough Trade: Most Normal.

Simply put, and all the more compelling because of how such a buzz about such a band, with such a capital artistic punch, can emanate from an independent record label is doubly a damn fine demonstration about how to captivate the anarchic imagination rolling around a society anaemic with informational fever. One weened and seized with a carnivorous circus of consumer goods complimented by cinnamon sprinkled television repeats and completed by repeat prescriptions to ease the bite of the next big governmental lie pulsating at the postmodern nexus and the queer media Jesus with their pronouns neatly displayed on a button badge on their Burton blazer is nailed to the cross above it all. 

This is their new album, their new name, their new statement – an abrasive diatribe against the Machiavellian, masochistic apparatuses of 2022 that Gilla Band, musically scathing and lyrically speaking cannot help but be troubled by what keeps ticking and chewing on, is forever, unsurprisingly found rolling around in its own digital filth. This is a retort, a response, a rollicking tossing of industrial noise punk that distorts the walls of the shadows that this year, and the year before that, and the year before that, somehow stinks the entire globe out the more it is copied and stretched over. 

They proceed to punch an astoundingly intense, feral raucous, and rampaging experimental rave every time with Most Normal, their most importantly Most Now album, standing as a continuation of how a band can curate such mighty work whilst exceeding expectations, excelling acclaim, trumping anticipation upon each whole release. Vital in how it uses lyrical vitriol to unveil the strangest of details about the strangest of people in the strangest of spaces. It’s one kind of venom against one kind of vinegar. This would be the culture of the condemned. To cancel is to cleanse. Cancellation as one of the last surviving choices people think they have to block someone on your social media feed as though they have been ceremonially burned at the stake for something someone said 50 years ago.

The culture obsessed with possession yet actually what is reflected back when such a culture is combing its hair and brushing its teeth in the morning before boarding the ache of another delayed train is a feeling of the hollow man, the freezing sensation of emptiness, the sonic violence of a floating rose in the form of Francis’ Bacon’s Man and Beast.  A culture of channeling our innate hatred charging the hearts and minds of each other into cancellations, into calculated questions. A society fat with sadness asking questions but blinded by the deafening, deadening silence that decorates the answer, that distances us from its important core: just what is Normal? Just who can tell? Why bother?

A recent interview with their frontman Dara Kiely confirms it to be lifted from a song on the album called I Was Away. But digging deeper the whole concept of Most Normal represents the linkages and leakages between songs (‘Everyone’s a weirdo…’) but also reflects the kinds of conditions the band were in at the time leading to their definition of Most Normal, of ‘normality is unique to the lens of the beholder’. 

What’s cast back at the beholder, looking at life, microscopic, holographic, narcotic, through their own personal lens, is all but a body – just The Gum. Gilla band’s opener for the new album continues to hiss and hum like the baby alien breaking free from John Hurt’s ribcage.  A worming hypnotic piece of hydraulic noise power punching into the crippled earth. Some insane vocals pierce the ears, screaming from the cold vacuum about how benign and polite and polarised the times currently area upon walking through one door that fronts a room of problems into another fucking room entirely stuffed with its own unique set of ravaged plans and problems. 

LTW: Humorous but about to be stoned to death. Humongous but due to the sheer velocity of what shreds from the centre of Most Normal (can get rid of?)

“The Gum makes us feel so small as insects and zombies walking, talking, trapped, taped in the supermarkets and citadels of the modern global estate where surveillance cameras are the dystopian disco balls of the tranquilised stampede of human flotsam and jetsam. In the amplified distance, the other dimension whilst whirling, unnerving bombasts of metallic planks are sharpened into sticks and played as what appears to be guitars gone mad and so bang their heads against the walls to create an atmosphere of antagonism by hiring a hard-as-hell gang to break the bones of pop songs and force them to dance for purposes of amusement and little else.

I’m fascinated by the idea of Gilla Band pushing themselves to new extremes in new territories. Setting themselves traps. Traps that snap and ravage. The image of them as a band that enjoys being unhinged and improvising but I suppose given the circumstances this spontaneous way of working was enhanced further. During this creative process of discovery, singer Dara nails it to something quite simple but such a statement reinforces their relationship with each other as something built upon solid foundations: ‘I guess from what I understand of the creative process when it comes to us is quite simple. We want to impress each other and tickle a spark in order to grow. We still buzz off the others’ talents and the way their minds work and how they complement the group scenario’.”

LTW: But they are so unassuming about it all. So humble despite producing an album that metamorphoses damaged stacks of amplifiers into black holes that swallow melodies and spit them out as stars, tarred and muffled in amongst the glorious awakening of the giant’s belch. Eight Fivers hitting the lyrical nail on the head as blunt as the bricks of the English language will allow by reeling off a list of shit shops that sell shit clothes and how the whole experience was rather shit (can get rid of?)

“Lyrically taking influence from when Kiely was growing up, the grand total of 40 quid as a symbol of gratefulness in place of fashion, whilst also being self-conscious and all to aware of what is lacking in one’s life and the possible platter of goods to fill that expanding hole. As shameful a thing as growing up almost always is, it was doubly so for the young Kiely who wasn’t able to afford the ideal look he wanted and so, the next best thing is all we are allowed to borrow from our siblings – in this case, Dara’s old clothes. Those bell-bottomed flares that failed to reach anywhere near his ankles humorously, tragically tested in a song that slays with one disconcerting stare, both psychotic and woebegone that shatters the sine when the voice the eyes belong to wriggles under the skin.

There’s a receipt for the specific feeling most likely purchased at Debhenems or Spar or Aldi or Lidl that you were searching for whilst wearing or wanting another bloody awful polo shirt. The shit one. Boiled in turmoil, tracking the scars, the fractures, the crash – it utilizes the sick Gilla Band trick of using primitive percussion with Dara Kiely’s demented vocals stood on the edge of a table in a room without any windows or doors. But although the band have their box of toys and bag of tricks for sure, this time around it was important to empty them on the floor and find something that hadn’t been used before: ‘we are very cautious to try and not repeat them. Once you name something, it needs to be questioned on where it will go after. Growth and development in creativity is what we really care about.”

LTW: It’s the dynamic dip that forces you to come up for air or be completely obliterated by what’s about to come. What comes is a fist of leviathan guitars hammer nails into the space, into the silence. Tiny explosions of feedback like scalpels or soldering irons stabbed into the sides of amplifiers. Exposed are the granulated biscuit-bones of the doomed consumer who is unwilling to discover they are such by trying on a brand new pair of bootcut jeans and a nifty haircut to match the disaster of ruining them when washed in a brand new Bosch. The lyrics stretched and attempted to be unpinned from the floorboards. A seismic attack of white-hot guitars that blister the skin then pop its bubbles with brazen, hissing sprays of feedback and shattered glass mirrors. Neurotic. Atomic. Electric. Relentless. A neck without a head. The head smiling on the floor (can get rid of?)

“I didn’t want to mention the name change but a new name is in some ways a new band and therefore, Most Normal finds them roaming and rolling around in fierce, new sonic territory. One that possesses the gradual, corrosive drones and restless post-punk punch of their other stuff, from 2015’s Holding Hands With Jamie to 2019’s The Talkies. But here, there is more room to move, to play, to encapsulate something silly at creative odds with what they have done before because like most musicians, like most people – there was no room to move at all.

It’s most certainly not a lockdown or post-pandemic album. It is rooted and roosts in a dark place of life, a dreamlike state of mind – we have unintentionally become familiar.
The band couldn’t meet up in bars. They couldn’t experiment with the songs live and experience them develop as they fell from them – a usual procedure that helped garner the results for their earlier work. But still, they decided to formulate the album by reinventing the wheel as it turned and turned. Regularly reciprocating to what was being churned out, to fuck with things, throwing things against walls and using what didn’t stick to get the greatest takes, the best, inventively lacerating and fascinating tracks that encapsulate the energy of being pissed in a room and follow where your nose got a whiff of intuition firing up where what the band call ‘maverick invention’ was a staple diet of their daily clock-in and clock-out routine that enabled them, as drummer Adam Faulkner confirms ‘to try out every wild idea’.

The wild idea being to create drum tracks out of essentially anything that was at hand. In true industrial spirit, to become one with your surroundings, to locate the portal and make contact, to create communication, to not feel demeaned and demoralised or derelict when doing so. At the time, the sheer state of isolation and governmental indecisiveness about what was going on provided the band with a similar state of endless fun in the studio to test and tinker: ‘there’s that saying that an album doesn’t get finished it gets released. I firmly believe that. It’s great to go deep and try to get the absolute best out of a track but having deadlines is great thing to actually get it done’. It allowed them to use the walls to create the wall of noise itself.”

To publish a list of influences is pointless. They are entirely their own thing. Catching themselves by surprise as much as us. Containing the free-form chaos in all its freeform behaviors superbly. They were, however, inspired by some modern, deformed corpse hip-hop mangled together with Throbbing Gristle’s abandoned-factory menace. A rollicking admixture of COUN and AFX, Coil and Cromagnon, of Lightning Bolt and Lemon Kitten, Nautical Almanac and Hey Colossus – but even then it’s just an idea. Something subjectively I can detect but is probably a million miles off the mark. As is often the case when attempting to contrast one kind of art for another according to what? According to the latest addition to your neat, tidy playlist? According to the latest filling filed away in your record collection? 

They were intoxicated by this particularly liberating tonic when recording The Talkies as Ballintubert House in Dublin as it turned clocks to mush. Free from constraint, available to endlessly tinker, it gave them a lease of self-sufficiency that ‘proper studios’, in all their expenses, didn’t creatively afford them.

Then Covid came along in 2019, and they came out with this. Out came that wild idea. A capsule for the noise, a container for the unknown and utterly odd that 2019 has just about got over, but in a way that unleashes so much, so often. 

In any case – those artists, like THIS artist, are the ones that never do the same thing twice. Tracks that shapeshift and break apart in a way that is brutal but with moments of beauty.  The structure’s nerves are severed from their connections, chords and riffs, and licks that rock back and forth are dismantled and disintegrate into intricate pieces before everything smashes forward at once in a wild torrent of unabating rage. It was another idea to use the recording studio as a creative tool and regarding the formative unfurlings of some recordings as only the babiest of baby steps until the final furnishings of the post-production stage of the album’s completion.

It’s a theory (The Studio as a Compositional Tool) from 1983. Delivered in the form of an essay in New York in which he says about both constraint and the studio as tool that a) ‘everyone is constrained in one way or another, and you work within your constraints. It doesn’t mean that suddenly the world is open, and we’re going to do much better music, because we’re not constrained in certain ways. We’re going to do different music because we’re not constrained in certain ways we operate under a different set of constraints’’. 

On the mixer itself, Eno goes on to say of the 24-track recorder that ‘the mixer is really the central part of the studio’. This is because of what the mixer can do to contribute not just to record, but to use as a tool to explore the hidden sections of the spectrum, to stretch and pick at and pull apart, that might otherwise be covered up. Constrained or not constrained, different is a better word than…well better. You can have all the time in the world and then some but that doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to get gold. If anything the more gold you mine you inevitably always end up with dirt. Gilla Band makes different music. 

This is their version of a different kind of music. Otto-Muehl-ambient and explosive, industrial episodes. An unrelenting lacerating from behind. A delirious, premium panic attack of noise punk aching the noise like a migraine chomping on the face. This new way of working opened up a lot of possibilities for Gilla Band, forcing them to think in different ways: ‘once one tests themselves it can pave a way to be even more creative. Over lockdown, we got more instruments and wrote in different ways. It’s exciting to do the next thing. Just keep developing and having fun with the unknown’.

Backwash is part ridiculous and nightmarish – ‘it became a muscle, a hustle to be a Jack Russell, whose head was deaf and once again, binged the Big Brother box set’. The rhythm of life is one of repetition. Mirrored by a constantly kicking, clicking rhythm occasionally sparking with little, delightful pops and pangs, zaps and rasps of acidic noise that drop on top at different moments. They detonate and jolt and jump up and sink into the skin like fleas racing around a rug of thick fur. Shocks of sputtering ugliness rise from the gutter; the band circling it confused about what slumbers underneath, compelled to see what’s running below the streets of a scorched mind. Things winding up and winding down. Things being sent and received. Things being controlled, challenged, and contorted. Septic melodies growing and groaning.

The freewheeling, caterwauling clatter of Binliner Fashion does well at assisting in the madman becoming unrestrained from his straightjacket. Almost touching the shoulder upon breaking free…and then he saw ‘a wall, a wall, a wall, a wall, a wall, a wall’. A wall to bang the head against all electrocuted and contused, all derailed and aggravated, all agitated and itchy to rip apart. It hisses and spits as it splits down the middle from the forehead downwards into the murderous Capgras, named after a psychological disorder that de-realises, that de-recognises, that disassociates people attached to our daily lives. In the mind of the person who suffers from this delusion of doubles, anyone from lovers to best friends can become imposters, they become imitators, they become actors, liars, thieves, and spies.

This syndrome is spared little if any of its hellish features when Gilla Band get going, hoping to somehow show a glimpse of life on the other side of that complex state of mind where old friends are suddenly unfamiliar ghosts and odd arrays of faces. It swallows bits of your brain by the mouthful. Foaming when suspended in a state of permanent disbelief that the Cronenbergesque ‘screen’ has replaced your familiar cohorts dazed by an ambiance in the ear, with twitching limbs and a bell behind the lightbulb eyes.

A voice haunted in the corner collides with another voice in the corner replicating as best they can that lack of any ability to recall the honesty in a real image, a genuine human being who belongs – it is all a screen, it is all smoke. Disoriented in the middle of such a boggling fog a prisoner with a neurological defect as great as this is heard pining to a silver sky in the name of escape from the belly of a slashed speaker transmitted to hideous effect. And in spite of the nearly-there lap-steel guitar that sits below the psychosomatic drama of everything with guitarist Alan Duggan confirming ‘there is a lot of…though it might not be super apparent. It is there. No chords. Just chaos.

The chug of I Was Away charges forth and through the porridge bowl of frenetic, cacophonous collage of post-punk attack and utter, vitriolic assault of marred noise warfare. A butcher’s blade into a block of noise. Gored by the morning with an electric chair pulled up to the dining room table. Conjoined twin melodies psychically severed. Abstract sketches of muscular drums that are floored and then flipped back again all trip and tumble from nothing into something. The attention always grabbed from start to finish. There is no climax. Just a low, perverted rumbling. A constant mirage of demonic techno-warble with a serrated hardcore throb throughout. A deconstructive, destructive reworking of paradigms, thought processes, disorders and formulas that works in the band’s favor. Polluting the spool of tape like a surface for their whims to function on. 

First signs of melody melt over you with Almost Soon. A leviathan guitar squeals aloud before being flattened face-first into the tarmac by burbles of rotten, fuzzy ooze. The details of the aftermath, the narrative of which starts and ends with one’s own condition in private, primitive oblivion. The secret anecdotes of how the mind can construct itself into an island of any size we can often end up marooned on is articulated in the sweltering Red Polo Neck or the caustic Pratfall – which along with Gushie provides a brief burst of ambiance to alleviate the pressured, stress-induced force of what has ensued. 

These are less like songs and more like a devolved, demented patchworking of sounds and visions, images and incantations sprouting from the mouth of Young Gods, Kurt Weill or Ray Price. Something the band enjoyed fucking with and throwing around.

With Most Normal, the band is busy at work in the lab. Spiritually accompanied by John Zorn’s Naked City or Nurse With Wound. Soon joined by Robert Rental and Vampire Rodents. Soon joined by Mars and NON. All triumphing in harnessing the new spectrum of sounds they have stumbled upon. Depraved of daylight, a humming continuum, a slashed avant-pop anti-disco stomp bleeding from the other sections of the portable cassette player, starved of natural air, teasing the abilities of hidden machines by turning all kinds of various teeth that protrude from their cool body and abuse something out of it to reach the zenith of wrathful frequency. It’s a pop song with broken teeth and blood on its hands. One for the headphones on the bus. 

Post-Ryan concludes Most Normal – a warbling, zombified groove. However, and this only reiterates further Gilla Band as the sonic embodiment of how all ideas, all influences, can be counted. It’s all about intake, intake, assimilation, filtration, about some kind of sensory ratio at work that when used properly as a property of fruitful production, creates something startling every time. In this case, they took a liking to bite into the timeless, instant, new wave sparkle of I Ran by A Flock of Seagulls, not too far from the intellect-sexiness of the more Popper than Pop stomp of Human League, or the immediate, exotic sophisti-pop splendor of ABC’s Poison Arrow is shot from a motorised bow before being liquified midair and dissolves into puddles as the desired starting point for something that is distilled, after being destroyed.

For Dara, it was about the characters in music that made this work: ‘I love hearing character in music. It could be a lyric that stands out like Elenore by The Turtles “You’re my pride and joy etc.” I think that’s genius. One can get inspired by anything and that can turn into whatever. We like to challenge ourselves and find stuff from various sources. That way there’s less of a chance of repeating yourself in a creative manner’. 

Starting with an agitated instrument of some sort with the dials directed towards maximum fuzz, before being joined by a straightforward drumbeat, reining in and reigniting the notion that drums that don’t do much, yet simultaneously, do everything if done well can upkeep everything else around it no matter how far gone into the wild things can grow, in true krautrock fashion, a pair of cymbals attached to the smiling monkey’s hands animatronic ally slapping together, coaxing everything out of the corner to unfold in the most controlled, yet chaotic way possible. Everything quickly disappears as though hiding from an overhead cloud that consumes all below it. The burning, burbling carnage is eliminated as though we have been sucked into a television that is plagued by perennial zaps of static. The remote control stuffed somewhere between the cushions in a couch on a landfill sight during a blizzard in The Upside Down. 

This song specifically is devoid of any surrealism but possesses that air of nightmarish magic radiating from every wild line. It’s a matter-of-fact confessional, some malicious poking of the index finger into a wound that refuses to scab over composed by Kiely whilst sitting alone in an old chair at the switchboards of the soul one evening that witnessed this ”something direct, something that wasn’t abstract and surreal,” take place. 

He took the track home and wrote melodies to it which were thrust forward into thrashing action by the blunt lyrics Dara had never done before, positioning him in an intensified state of vulnerability, terrified by this newfangled rawness: ‘I was terrified because I never wrote that direct about anything before. They are some of my favorite people in the world and I wanted them to like it. It opens up new avenues for the next batch of tracks. I have that in my arsenal and feel a lot more confident than I did before about exploring that side of things’. 

There’s still the same kind of lyrical spillage that jabs itself in the ribs with a pocketknife and guts the heart to alleviate pressure from the brain sure. But here, it presents itself as a nude self-portrait buried just below the throb of the rattled, scuttling drums like Leonard Cohen lost and looking for answers to life’s oldest, and therefore, preposterous questions in the bottom of a bottle: ‘I’m in recovery, I’m just the same prick’. As literal as the group has ever come to closing in on the bones of confronting the self in all its weaknesses – the reflection on its knees even though you stand before it, albeit with that self-deprecating, reflective, absurdist edge.

Because of this new way of working, Dara was afraid of what everyone’s reaction would be upon hearing this stark, deadpan existential sonnet, his satirical soliloquy in the queue. Even having to leave the room when the remaining members of the band were listening to it. ‘But it’s probably my favorite track on the album. It’s an uncomfortable listen, for me, but I like it a lot’. Perhaps this is so because of the kinds of newly unearthed personal extremes and creative stakes that the band were playing with.

As always with a new Gilla Band album, there is an unavoidable air of anticipation created from the salivating lips of their adoring cult following and impressed crowds who witness the band live in action alike for a new release. It swirls around their shoulders like they have a responsibility to get our nerves going and gut our stomachs of any unnecessary evils it carries.

The release in question, this release, does nothing but deliver that near unsurpassable, always insuppressible air into our lungs, injecting good things out of bad and intellect things out of ignorant in all their immoveable ability to sculpt sonic architecture into a multitude of various objects, a force of abrasive nature born from holding a contact mic up to the hole at the heart of the human condition and listening back to what that dirty old soul whispers back.

This time around, and although those sonic footprints remain firmly intact, sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful, sometimes subtle, sometimes subliminal, both noise and nuance, a document of panicked rambles and flammable head of imaginary disasters, how secretly they can wash over, or race through you – the nature has changed, the game is up.

Post-covid threw our once safely shaped ideologies about what our commonplace conceptions of ‘Most’ Normal could really be. We can no longer wear that mask, adopt that disguise, assume that banal position. The veneer is wrinkled and weathered. The finger on the remote control to dictate and decide each and every move of each and every man, woman, and child is splintered to pieces. It mutilated our imaginations, it warped reality, it attempted to have swept so much hate under the societal carpets and supplied an endless pot of ammunition for the weaponised lie that leaked from the eyes of No.10.

We had to adapt, no choice to move left or right, no chance to move anywhere at all. That kind of survivalism, that kind of nationwide spellbinding, that kind of spectacular, global surveillance now means that our concept of what is ‘Most’ Normal, is anything but. 

So thank god we have this. This penicillin. A thrust through the lower back until it bursts its way through the belly button. A magnetic, progressive demonstration of dynamics divided four fascinating ways that writhe in unity on the other side of a psyche’s rattling threshold. A seismic, subconscious unlocking. 

A new name or even a new band perhaps, and if so, then Most Normal is only the beginning. ‘It was an illuminating experience,’ says bassist Daniel Fox, of the new creative processes Gilla Band indulged on the album. ‘It was a really fun way of working and writing songs. And I would be pretty shocked if we didn’t continue like this. We tried some really interesting ideas here, and it’s not like we’ve run dry on them. It feels infinite, in a way.’What way to implement a refocusing of their predatory, futurist-fucking-a-nihilist-on-a-dancefloor-in-your-head seizure than all that.

~

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Ryan Walker is a writer from Bolton. His online archive for Louder Than War can be found here.

Source: louderthanwar.com