Girl Band - The Talkies

With their second record beginning with an almost two-minute track of agitated breathing, frontman Dara Kiely isn't concerned whether you 'get' Girl Band or not. Like all their previous records, 'The Talkies' is a form of therapy. A way to process the world through sounds. Unsteady yet melodic. An attempt to connect the senses to the brain in the fastest way possible.

Continually flicking between loud and quiet, twisting and turning words to create new sounds, elongating the familiar into something unusual. It all makes for a record that's as unsettling as it is funny. Hearing Kiely build a song full of palindromes then calling it 'Aibohphobia' (the phobia of palindromes; itself a palindrome) is darkly comic. As is him telling the Irish mythological creature The Salmon of Knowledge that it knows "fuck all" on the track of the same name.

He uses Gaelic and English in the same sentence, testing the limits of language and pronunciation until the lyrics serve more as sounds than things with meaning. It's difficult to even put meaning to the lyrics, as Kiely sings of "Lisping wasps / Jaap Staam-mering thoughts / Arse fell out arse ways" ('Laggard'). What meaning you attach to them is mostly your own, if you even find any, because it's what noise they create that's more important to the overall texture of these songs.

Like with some of Martian Hannett's more unusual recording techniques, including forcing Joy Division's Stephen Morris to play drums on the roof of a flat, Girl Band have explored the very outer edges of production. You'll be hard pushed to find a record that sounds like 'The Talkies'.