“Well it’s definitely very hot in here,” deadpans singer Dara Kiely one song in, blond fringe already thick with sweat. The humidity is exacerbated by the capacity audience bunching as close as they can to the stage. Maybe they’re hanging on for dear life, because there’s something so brilliantly visceral about Girl Band’s noise that it’s like a physical force; amps roaring like jet-engines at full blast.
If you were to transcribe their songs, you would have to forget traditional notation. Instead, you’d need diagrams spelling out exact methods of instrument abuse, avant techniques cribbed from old Sonic Youth and no wave records, taken for a gleefully gory joyride.
It’s the joy with which Girl Band wreak their havoc that sets them apart. Their music might draw inspiration from egghead-rock texts, but there’s nothing chin-strokey about the abandon with which they play it. Like a toddler, it’s all id, no ego. Moments like Pears for Lunch’s sudden veer into oncoming traffic are played like pop hooks; glorious explosions of Big Dumb Noise. For all their abundant reference points, Girl Band’s noise feels like a refreshingly new language, one that makes anything remotely trad-rock seem hopelessly archaic.
They’ve mastered techno’s inhuman textures with their FX-battered guitars, but also its irresistible sense of tension and release. It’s a connection made explicit by their cover of Blawan’s underground banger Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage, replacing the original’s electronic pulse with waves of infernal amp-hum, a rasping hi-hat and Kiely howling the title over and over (and over) again.
Machines, of course, can repeat the same action indefinitely, to perfection. Humans, however, are imperfect, and as Bodies wears on, you can sense Girl Band struggling to hold it together, the ear-flattening guitar-noise and swooping bassline making the walls shake, Kiely tearing his throat to shreds, that hi-hat ever-threatening to spill off its stand. The effect is chaotic, electrifying; it feels genuinely dangerous, like one last rave before the apocalypse, and as perfect an expression of rock’n’roll’s essential auto-destructive impulse as this writer’s ever heard.
