Spectreview: Girl Band – The Talkies

-YELLOW-

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“When its depressed
Still in love
When its happy
Still in love
When its all sad
Still in love
When its anxious
Still in love”

Is something about to happen? We love it when it feels like something’s about to happen. There’s been this perfect storm between post-punk and noise-rock that’s found excellent applications in recent works like black midi’s Schlagenheim and IDLES’ Joy As An Act Of Resistance, and Girl Band’s The Talkies may be yet another installment in this potential trend. (Call it “panic-rock?”) Divorced from other contexts, it’s a ridiculous album, stuffed front-to-back with rythymic atonal punk songs spiced with a hint of sonic experimentation and a lead singer who apes having Wernicke’s aphasia. Your less-than-generous interpreters will dismiss this record completely: it’s too long, it’s too samey, its twists and turns have ben done better by countless other bands, and one look at a lyric sheet will have you seeking reconstructive surgery from rolling your eyes too hard. But maybe Girl Band are doing something different here, something that needs to be tuned into. The album’s opener, “Prolix,” provides a legend for the band’s topographical illustrations of mental illness; as queasy synths quiver in the background, frontman Dara Kiely experiences a purportedly real panic attack behind the mic, heaving and hyperventilating for your empathy. On that wavelength, the record’s length and sameness becomes trance-inducing (especially in songs like the id-unbound “Amygdela” and the Moore-Renaldo cyclone of “Going Norway”), and its lapses into noisy, collagist breakdowns live up to their name. Kiely’s word salad may not provide any semantic footholds, but their free associations, combined with his full-bodied performances, are extremely effective in conveying the kind of brain-breaking anxiety that fails coherency. It’s a take that would only make sense in today’s discussions of mental health awareness, and so while it does indeed drag in parts (there’s a stretch from “Couch Combover” to “Salmon of Knowledge” that may be the common drop-off point) the band should be given kudos for providing such a visceral representation of an increasingly common experience.

Recommended unless you need to sit down for a second.