Few bands push sonic experimentation as far as Gilla Band. The Irish quartet — renamed after long bearing another name — have made distortion, feedback and the electronic treatment of guitars the very heart of their music. Most Normal radicalises this approach: it is a record where noise is no longer an accident but a raw material, shaped with a goldsmith’s precision.
The critics (an 85 average across nine reviews) hailed the daring of a work that pushes the limits of post-punk and noise rock. In Gilla Band, the guitars no longer sound like guitars: they sputter, crackle, disintegrate, transformed into strange textures that evoke industrial music as much as the most abrasive electronica.
Over this mastered chaos, Dara Kiely’s voice deploys a flow of anxious, fragmented, near-hallucinated words that voice inner turmoil and contemporary anguish. The rhythm section, for its part, anchors the whole in an obsessive pulse, offering a foothold amid the din.
This radicalism is also the record’s limit: Most Normal is a trying experience, demanding of the listener a certain tolerance for noise and discomfort. Those seeking melodies or choruses will be out of luck. But whoever agrees to be disoriented will find an unsuspected richness in it.
Verdict: 8.5/10. A demanding, deeply inventive record, proof that noise can be sculpted like a noble material. An experience apart.
