Album of the Week: Gilla Band – The Early Years
Album of the Week: Gilla Band – The Early Years
It might not be a brand-new release from Ireland’s premier noise-rock outfit, but the 10th anniversary reissue of their 2015 compilation The Early Years EP is certainly worth celebrating. Long out of print, this reissue gives fans who missed it the first time a chance to finally own a vital piece of the band’s genesis. Compiled from a run of singles released before their critically acclaimed debut Holding Hands with Jamie, The Early Years EP captures some of the rawest, most explosive material in the catalogue of a band well known for raw, explosive material.
Let’s briefly cast our minds back to 2015, when Holding Hands with Jamie first arrived via the esteemed British indie label Rough Trade. To say its release sent shockwaves through the Irish indie scene might be a stretch, but it definitely ushered a cultural shift, and, in hindsight, can be seen as a major catalyst for the wave of Irish bands that have followed: Fontaines D.C., Just Mustard, M(h)aol, The Murder Capital, to name a few. It’s also not too far-fetched to suggest that Gilla Band’s prominence and the critical success of their early work encouraged label scouts to invest more widely in Irish music, traditional or otherwise.
The Early Years EP charts where it all began, we here at Tower Records can still recall members of the group dropping in copies of some of these early tracks by hand. The Early Years is a concise presentation of Gilla Band as the singular force they still are. Despite their influence, they’ve never been imitated and they remain wholly, fiercely unique.
The EP kicks off with Lawman, a 2014 track driven by a rugged, krautrock-inspired beat (it bares more than a passing resemblance to Faust’s early industrial experiments), buzzing guitars, and crashing cymbals. Swimming somewhere through this abrasive brew is vocalist Dara Kiely, whose conversational, often-yelped delivery is full of jokes, puns, surreal humour and flashes of terror. His lyrics, once deciphered, lend the chaos a human, oddly resonant edge.
De Bom Bom, seemingly about erectile dysfunction, rides a stuttering, punishing rhythm that owes as much to industrial techno as it does to post-punk. Kiely’s glorious poetic missives include the Joycean: “Anyway, what else to say / The burger girl lettuce astray” before closing the song with repeated shouts of “pathetic phallus.” Then there’s I Love You, clocking in at under two minutes, and probably the catchiest thing here, which in Gilla Band’s world is almost a criticism. Still, its spoken/melodic delivery and tight groove recall early 2000s dance-punk, like early Liars, and it sticks with you.
The highlight, though, is the near 8-minute cover of Blawan’s industrial techno track Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage? It follows the same trajectory as the original but swaps synths for layers of guitar damage and pounding rhythm. By the six-minute mark, as Kiely’s deranged, full-throttle vocals rip through, the track fully erupts into magnificent mayhem. The Early Years is worth it for the inclusion of Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage? alone. It’s one of the defining moments in the band’s formative years, a bold, unpredictable, and totally committed statement.
While other Irish bands may now be making bigger commercial waves, Gilla Band were never built for the mainstream. Nor, I suspect, would they ever want to be. That’s precisely what makes them one of the most influential, and important, Irish bands of the past decade.
