Will Bishop
Everyone has a different reaction to grief. Some expect it to be immediate, a fast-acting chemical agent triggering some latent resting sadness. Others think it’ll be slow, a dreary uneventful trudge until you find some material piece of a person and it stabs you clean through your foot. For Gilla Band frontman Dara Kiely, grief has been more like a radiation chamber.
Pugnello, Gilla Band’s fourth album and first since the death of Kiely’s father, demonstrates a band in the throes of a seemingly horrific episode. A smorgasbord of motormouthed pop culture references, misappropriated turns of phrase and anguished screams — it’s akin to listening to the self-deifying ravings of a man on a bus at 3 a.m., but filtered through the band’s signature weaponized noise, you start to feel that maybe he is god.
At times, the album strips away its conspiratorial mise-en-scène style and lays bare some bleak emotional truths. Track three is titled “Alogia,” meaning poverty of speech, a common condition of schizophrenia. Towards the end of the song, when Kiely declares “All scarlet alogia,” it’s as if he’s characterizing it as a transmittable sickness or a flower in bloom. “At the Gallop,” the album’s bleakest track, swaps out Kiely’s vocal theatrics for a monotoned robot voice. “I’m dead to lots of people. Even to the ones I love.” it drones.
Kiely’s mental health struggles have been no secret — resulting in cancelled shows, stints in the hospital, a period where he lived in a tent in his parents’ backyard and, yes, a brief dalliance with believing himself to be god — it wasn’t until recently that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. “Prolix,” the opening track on their 2019 release The Talkies, prominently featured a recording of Kiely suffering a panic attack, leading to a pervasive feeling that there was something happening to Kiely. On Pugnello opener “The Angelus,” Kiely feels much more like the something that’s happening. Exploding outward, rather than collapsing inward.
Where the band truly makes this outpouring of madness its own is in its whimsically unhinged lyricism. Painting in absurdist emotional vulnerabilities against a canvas of undulating distorted mayhem. The kaiju industrial stomp of “The Megazord” could have you convinced you’re listening to a very serious and very intense song — until Kiely starts screaming, “I assembled the Megazord!” and it becomes abundantly clear he’s talking about a Power Rangers action figure. This is also not the sole Power Rangers reference across the album.
With a boundary-pushing lineup at his back — comprised of guitarist Alan Duggan, bassist Daniel Fox and drummer Adam Faulkner — Kiely could easily lose himself to self-seriousness. The auditory assault on display is staggering. At times akin to getting battered by syncopated steel rain. Yet, in a paradoxical turn, it’s Kiely’s frantic screeds of dissociative rambling that root the album in normalcy. There’s a core friction between the mundanity of the subject matter, the spontaneity of its delivery and the hostility of its backdrop that makes Pugnello infinitely compelling and fresh.
Gilla Band — employing spinelike rhythmic structures, then dipping them ever deeper into vats of boiling metallic flesh — have pushed their trademark blend of post-punk, industrial techno, noise rock and no wave to new heights. Tracks like “Alogia” have a slinky danceability to them, with synths like lungs heaving up and down and strutting percussion. The deranged polyrhythmic groove of “Crisp Pop,” supplemented by smothered screams and a snappy bassline, is a vertebrae-snapping good time. Provided you don’t mind if, when you cut the proverbial rug, it sounds a bit like it’s wailing in pain.
Will Bishop is a Cal Poly Humboldt journalism major. He is prone to writing essays about things that bother him and fictional works about things that also bother him, but in different ways.