Gilla Band - Most Normal (2022) [Official Digital Download]

Gilla Band (fka Girl Band) used lockdown's excessive free time to distort "Most Normal" into their most industrial and experimentally minded album yet, mangling each song into noisy assemblages of post-Fall vocals and gravel-gargling noise backdrops.

We were already sold by Gilla Band's prior catalog: their silt dragged DIY pop felt necessary in a musical landscape pocked with pallid precision and wrung-out, algorithmic nostalgia. 'Most Normal' shuttles their sound into fresh terrain, just about, folding in new influences and allowing them to shape their songs into choppy abstraction, hitting rhythmic blasts against Nurse With Wound-inspired sewage pipe ambiance. Opener 'The Gum' doesn't leave much to the imagination, firing machine-gun rimshots over searing feedback and noise grot; a song eventually rises from the burnt out remains, screamed by frontman Dara Kiely and stuttered into CD-stuck psychedelic absurdity. There's the trace of a post-punk anthem in there somewhere, teased into its constituent elements by the band and distorted into manic screaming distortion that, before it draws to a close, mutates into a comedic cartoonish routine.

Gilla Band hit a more coherent note on 'Backwash', matching a motorik beat with Kiely's incessant vocals and the kind of atonal sonic blasts that feel like a wrecking ball hitting an unblemished surface. It's the bass on this one that really gets us though: focus yer hearing and there's a synth wobble in the background that lends the track its unmistakable groove. This obscuring of elements and obstruction of form is what Gilla Band do best - at their core they're an avant-pop band, but their musical literacy and desire to innovate allows them to crack each song down the middle and work out what needs to stay and what needs to go. Sometimes it's just color and texture, sometimes it's rhythm, sometimes it's a basic tune; inevitably we're left with the scars and skeletal remains of music we just about recognize, daubed in contemporary two-tone paint that lends the art its modern edge.

The band are at their best when they give themselves time to chug through ideas with a sense of grandeur and epic narrative building. On 'The Weirds' we're ushered through a few minutes of Christian Marclay-esque noise in the first act before the track builds and builds until it sputters and collapses into squealing, disorientating rhythmic discomfort. If yr into Sonic Youth, The Body, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Liars or even This Heat, you'll love this.

Tracklist:
1. The Gum (02:48)
2. Eight Fivers (02:21)
3. Backwash (03:21)
4. Gushie (01:10)
5. Bin Liner Fashion (02:18)
6. Capgras (00:55)
7. The Weirds (06:44)
8. I Was Away (04:38)
9. Almost Soon (03:23)
10. Red Polo Neck (01:59)
11. Pratfall (02:35)
12. Post Ryan (04:26)


Thanks to the Original customer!