(Photo Credit - Richard Gilligan)
Advance Review - Girl Band - The Talkies, Rough Trade Records (September 27, 2019)
This album immediately hits you in the head from both sides with the drums and the aggressive vocals. It’s a challenge for me to accurately describe what this sounds like. “Big” doesn’t seem enough of a word, but that’s what it is.
Recorded at an Eighteenth Century manor house just outside of Dublin - (I looked it up, it’s fancy, it’s covered in ivy and John Hurt used to live there) the band made use of all of the space to create a complete soundscape for the album. It works too. It made me feel a bit like some sort of lost heroine in a Jane Austin novel (if she had just taken some acid and was wandering aimlessly through an old house to a rock soundtrack rather than trying to find a suitable marriage partner)
The band themselves see the album as an audio representation of the place in which it was made and this seems accurate to me. It’s hard to pick out individual tracks because everything melds and flows together. It’s certainly not made to be shuffled on Spotify and you’ll find nothing sweet or poppy here. The guitars and drums crash, the vocals travel from soft to screaming and everything in between and somehow it all weaves together until there is no breathing space from the noise.
The sixth track, "Salmon of Knowledge" initially seems like a surprise, jolting you out of the world that has been created up to that point with what seems like a more standard rock song, but it slowly shifts and pulls you back into Girl Band’s world with the next two instrumental tracks.
This album is an experience. It’s something to get completely lost in, don’t try to do anything else, just sit back and let it happen around you. If you like your music stranger than the average, come and take a trip with Girl Band.
The Talkies will be out on 27th September. The band play dates in the US and Europe throughout October and November.
Rating - 3/5