Girl Band make noise rock for dancers

When I say “dance band” I don’t mean in the way you might dance to The Strokes at a club night, but dance in the sense that the music Girl Band makes has as much in common with the brutalist minimal techno of the likes of Container, or the frightening soundscapes created by Ben Frost – and the group has already professed a love for Daft Punk, no strangers to a loop or two. For an act made up of drums, bass, guitar and vocals it’s quite a feat for these Irishmen to create a record that might equally be at home on Sub Pop as, say, Tri Angle Records.

The power of repetition is strong on The Early Years, whether it’s the music anchored by solid square drumming or singer Dara Kiely’s way with uttering a baffling phrase over and over again. “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” is the perfect example: Alan Faulkner’s drumming switches between primal 4/4 beats and extreme usage of the hi-hat, Alan Duggan’s guitar creates wave upon wave of feedback and white noise, rising up before being suppressed while Kiely repeats the title of the track over and over again. And that’s it – nothing else happens for eight minutes but the barrage of noise, the rhythm never faltering even when Kiely’s voice collapses into screaming horror. It’s like Daft Punk playing at your house, then capturing, torturing and murdering everyone there.

You occasionally have to remind yourself that the track is a cover, but it informs the sound of Girl Band’s own songs on the rest of the EP. There’s little of the sludgy, scuzzy Girl Band who released 2012’s France 98 to be found here: it’s once again Faulkner’s percussion that defines “Lawman”, all flat beat and hi-hat while Kiely slurs lines like “I saw another woman with my eyes closed”, “I used to be good looking” and “I know I’m not a racist boy”, absurdly, gnomically, hilariously, frighteningly. Not once do we catch Duggan play a recognisable chord or riff, he instead chooses one-note feedback, pure No Wave noise and everything in between, bassist Daniel Fox doing nothing more than making sure he keeps time with the drums. The scratchy assault of “De Bom Bom” approaches 120bmp techno territory, pounding at the senses as Kiely wails and moans breathlessly from start to end, and it’s only briefly on “Love You” that you can hear a rock band peer through the noise and beats, sounding a little like Clinic in their early and chaotic days. The EP ends on the thirty-one seconds of “The Cha Cha Cha”, cramming as many Sam Cooke references in as humanly possible while exposing man’s never-ending stupidity at the same time.

Whether The Early Years will turn out to be a document of Girl Band’s development at a particular time like France 98 appears to have been (the title certainly hints at it), or whether we can expect the album to expand on this particular minimalist palette remains to be seen. Either way, it’s an astonishing starting point.