An attempt to sonically recreate Ballintubbert House, the 18th-century manor near Dublin in which it was recorded, Irish quartet Girl Band’s second album is a true haunted-house horror. Opening with the scrappy breaths of a panic attack, snarled in uneasy, slithering electronics, The Talkies sets their roguish, Fall and Liars-indebted noise among unnerving effects and dynamics designed to alarm. Going Norway layers frontman Dara Kiely’s howls over stabbing, flanged guitars, while Shoulderblades finds dark mutterings about Ricki Lake and Ed Mordake – rendered all the more nightmarish by Kiely’s deliberate removal of all pronouns – lost among panning metallic rumbles.
It’s an intensely, intentionally stressful listen, the occasional victory of thumping, clanking grooves over the scraping, grating racket offering an illusion of normality before snatching it away again. As such, there’s little room here for questions like “what’s the big single, lads?” – though Aibophobia, a palindromic puzzle with instrumental parts learned and recorded, Twin Peaks-style, in reverse before being replayed forward, or Couch Combover, with its staccato postpunk riffs and uneasily catchy refrains about fly-swatters and bath-bombs, stand out. It’s the terror of tracks like Laggard, with its self-destruct siren synths, distant dinosaur screams and erratic, tumbling drums, though, that stay with you long after you escape the twisting corridors of Ballintubbert House.
