How many bands can make an engaging song that simulates the sound of standing in the path of an oncoming train? That’s one of the many sensations evoked by ‘The Weirds’, the long and stellar midpoint of Gilla Band’s latest album, Most Normal. The Irish band is one of the many post-punk success stories to come out of that region in the past decade, as labels like Rough Trade uplifted a host of dissonant and deeply, well, weird styles of songwriting that weave myriad influences through dense patterns of noise. Forging through an extended hiatus between their first and second LPs, as well as a more recent name change, Most Normal builds on the band’s existing M.O. while, particularly in its second half, disintegrates into more abstract oddities.
While Kiely’s lyrics have distinct stretches of coherence, particularly around his longtime bêtes noires of style and consumerist culture, much of the band’s work, including Most Normal, thrives on a drip of assorted imagery that can quickly become a deluge at a moment’s notice. The sonic surroundings sell this even further – the train horn-like effect in ‘The Weirds’ is actually the guitar of Alan Duggan swelling louder with each repetition, almost drowning out Kiely’s words as the drums of Adam Faulkner remain unchanged, keeping time with a regularity that is, by contrast, rather unsettling. Throughout the set, Daniel Fox spends long stretches of songs bending his bass strings to produce strange noises, or playing by sliding an empty bottle of beer up and down the neck of his instrument, and on the record these sounds are panned from side to side on songs like ‘Backwash’, where the amorphous oscillations seem to ensnare the listener in a three-dimensional trap.
Kiely also sets sight on the topic of aging in his lyrics: “there’s a point when I stopped being cute / there’s a full stop on my youth” – a neurosis that joins his pantheon of worries that includes the appearance of his hair and his ability (or lack thereof) to pull off wearing a hat. It’s a long-standing trend, and going back numerous years to ‘Pears for Lunch’ – which appears early in the setlist, scrawled on the back of his hand – he mused “I look crap with my top off”. The audience sees some of this complex in real time when he remarks on the sweaty conditions inside the club vs the near-zero wind-chill just outside the door. “Take your jacket off!” shouts someone to the side of the stage, but he replies, “I can’t, it looks cool.” The blazer and dress shirt combo remains.
All that heat, by the way, owes far more to everyone in the room than any kind of air conditioning system. Through the din, the influence of industrial and techno is firmly underneath, and no matter what shape the songs morph into the packed room has plenty to work with, and the center of the crowd is a messy collider of bodies that occasionally sends someone gleefully ping-ponging out of the rough circle that they’ve formed, only to bounce right back in off the shoulders of others. Kiely’s addition of some unknown-to-me contraption that adds an additional layer of distortion to his voice in the second half of the evening only amps things up further. Any lulls in the onslaught of sound are setups for the next eruption, like on ‘Eight Fivers’ where one simply must respect the drop of heavy leaden wall of sound on the lyric, “I went to Aldi” – one of many stops along the song’s tour of high street shops where Kiely spends “all [his] money on shit clothes”.
The essence of Gilla Band is maybe best summarized by Most Normal’s closer ‘Post Ryan’, wherein Kiely declares: “I’m in between breakdowns / constantly in recovery”. This continuous shifting, where sometimes self-consciousness brings on anxiety and in others yields darkly-humorous acceptance, is ultimately what makes this massively-loud, textured noise so appealing and fills rooms on both sides of the Atlantic. The band would be formidable if all they did was provide an opportunity to lose oneself in the commotion, which is exactly what happens at the end of the night during the band’s evergreen cover of techno artist Blawan’s ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?’ – but the additional opportunity here, to unmoor oneself and wade around in the equally comforting and unnerving scattershot imagery of someone else’s mind, is what makes the clamor so sublime.
