Sometimes I’m like: What are we doing here? I mean as a band, as songwriters, as, ugh, artists.
I sit down to work on a song and put my fingers in the same places they’ve been 100,000 times before. Oh, look, an E chord. Never heard that before.
Eventually music starts to gel. There’s something – a riff, a lyric, an effect – that tickles my prefrontal cortex enough to go: I think that’s a new idea. And then I cross my fingers and hope that I’m not ripping off a long dead regional blues musician that Alan Lomax recorded in 1954 or the new St. Vincent album that I was listening to while driving to work because I am plowing ahead with this idea.
Inevitably, it turns into a rock song.
And sometimes I wonder: does anyone need another rock song?
With the ease of recording, there’s more music – rock and otherwise – created this year than in any year previous. And I get self-conscious, as I think most people with the impulse to create do, that what we’re doing doesn’t differentiate itself from what has come before it.
Post-punk, goth rock, garage rock, alt rock, indie – these genres, our bread-and-butter, are 30-, 40-, 50-years old. Are we just rock revivalists? Retro rockers with chorus pedals and Big Muff fuzzes? Is our artistic ceiling The Black Crowes? (To be fair, their innovation was a good one: what if we were The Rolling Stones but our singer could hold a note?) Are we doing anything that advances the artform?
I listen to an album like Gilla Band’s Most Normal and wonder if I’m just not trying hard enough to SOUND different.
Ireland’s Gilla Band started like so many post-punk bands by making often pained, sometimes funny, and regularly irritating sounding music. Influenced as much by Joy Division and singer Dara Kiely’s mental health issues as by The Chemical Brothers and Neu!, Gilla Band has produced three LP and a handful of stray tracks since 2011, with a few sabbaticals in between. Their first two records are a pretty standard post-punk amalgam: mechanized drums, slashing guitars, and bits of noise, topped with Kiely’s off-putting, sing-song brogue. They’re good albums, but they don’t stake out new territory.
After a lengthy hiatus, Gilla Band returned in 2022 with Most Normal, which it is decidedly not. Most Normal sounds like Gilla Band, but with everything that makes the band unique exaggerated. The drums are even more stripped back. I often can’t tell if they’re even played on a live kit, they’re so flat and compressed. Kiely seems even more unhinged, and his vocals are manipulated through filters, distortion, and delays warping them into a cyborg stew: half man, half machine. And the guitars…what guitars? Everything that should be a guitar sounds like a wall of static, or a bunch of bees, or a trash can falling down concrete stairs.
Gilla Band don’t play chords or notes so much as they paint in patches of distortion or lines of feedback. They sound like Skilsaws, lawn mowers, and industrial accidents. But this isn’t the type of feedback that comes from a single pedal flipped to 5:00, or a guitar set against an amp. It’s an orchestration of noise, more like Metal Machine Music or Glen Branca’s experimental albums from the early ‘80s where he would employ bands made up of up to 100 guitarists playing at the same time. Some of the tones on Most Normal are organized cacophony. It makes me feel lazy for only adding a #5 to a chord to make it sound “weird.”
Gilla Band apparently composed Most Normal in the studio with no concern for how it would translate on stage. Good for them. I would hate to be the tech responsible for all the MIDI programming to make this work live.
Following Gilla Band’s lead, the thing that I think we all, as artists (a word I sometimes shy away from, considering we’re generally trying to make music for drunk people to dance to), can take away is that we can always dig to make our work more distinct. We can always find the idea behind the idea. Besides, that’s the only way we’re going to be original in this 70-year-old genre of music.