Gilla Band – Pugnello – Album Review
by Killian Laher

Pugnello is Gilla Band’s fourth album, just about four years after Most Normal.  Fans can relax; they haven’t changed direction, gone soft or anything like that.  The first ten seconds of The Angelus have Dara Kiely bawling crazed lyrics over noise rock riffs, guitar, joined by drums that sound like bombs going off.

Placeholder has a stomping beat over which Kiely dementedly roars “I’m blaring a dangerous amount of Coldplay” (thankfully he isn’t!), but after two minutes this is replaced by indecipherable muttering over a dance groove.  Later on, Giraffe performs a similar trick halfway through, the track breaking into a heavy dance beat.  Some of it is hilarious, Kiely singing “dya know yer wan, she’s ka ka ka” in Alogia.  Elsewhere, he sounds increasingly desperate during the brief Three Hands Clapping before the track ends in the kind of dissolute voices found during the Velvet Underground’s The Murder Mystery.

The Megazord is one of the longer tracks here, and it has one of the more identifiable melodies and choruses on the album, albeit fairly distorted ones, and certainly not…. comfortable ones.  Crisp Pop is even longer at over seven and a half minutes, beginning with manic beats, adding various instruments as the intensity grows and the track descends into apocalyptic madness – babbling voices and machine noise.  The final track, At the Gallop, is a major departure with distorted, heavily treated vocals, sounding a bit like a machine, the type of thing the likes of Neil Young and Alan Sparhawk had a go at.  They combine this with pummelling drums, jarring noises and a menacing atmosphere.

If the above sounds barely comprehensible, well that’s because it is.  As with all their albums, it’s absolutely bonkers. You can’t sing along to it, and it hasn’t a hope of getting on any radio station anywhere.  People say these guys are really influential, but I don’t think there’s anyone in music, Irish or otherwise, who is doing anything like what they’re doing; they really are unique.

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