Girl Band
Holding Hands With Jamie
[Rough Trade]
A cover of Blawan’s Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?, which originally surfaced on Quompilation #3 in 2013, was built on for January 2014’s Lawman, which showed off a band really getting to grips with their dynamics, their power and their own aesthetic. Their live-set even then left you with ears ringing and face happy-slapped, but the intervening 18 months touring hard with the likes of Metz has seen this set – of all new tunes – honed into a filthy dirty fucking horror show.
Opener Umbongo is an hilariously abrasive squall and a totemic calling card for the rest of record: Holding Hands With Jamie is a procession of bludgeoning, uncompromising slabs of sound. For a gang of guys holding guitars and drums, this is a distant cousin to rock music. Instead of distorted chords, guitarist Alan Duggan deals in shapeshifting sheets of abstracted noise, like the screeching car accident soundscape of Sonic Youth’s In The Kingdom #19. Musical shifts channel industrial saws rather than counterpoint. Only on Texting an Alien is there something resembling a chord. The main nagging doubt is singer Dara Kiely’s reliance on the same faltering sung-spoken melody on a handful of tunes.
This is not music without precedent by any means. It has a long and distinct lineage, but that lineage is added to here with aplomb.
Like this? Try these:
Sonic Youth – Confusion is Sex/Kill Yr. Idols
Glenn Branca – The Ascension
V/A – No New York
Words: Ian Lamont
