Bands You Should Know: Gilla Band
Portrait by Mark McGuinness
Gilla Band are a four piece from Dublin, and as discussed in this interview, are a bit difficult to define.
Their music is visceral, disorientingly hypnotic, persistent, and often doesn’t concern itself with whether or not you think the pieces should fit. Dara Kiely’s lyrics are often uncomfortably earnest and confessed with such matter-of-factness that one might feel assaulted, his rolling voice splattering his mental state all over the distraught, intentful noise that band members Alan Duggan, Adam Faulkner, and Daniel Fox lay out for him. The layers of sound in which they encase themself feel almost physical - a thick wall of moving parts and ever-shifting, rarely utilized sonic textures. They’re a bit great. This interview was with guitarist Alan Duggan only a couple of days after completing a North American tour.
I saw you play in New York last week and that was fucking amazing!
Oh, cheers man. Thank you.
Where are you now?
We are all back home now. Back in Dublin.
How was tour?
It was cool, it was really encouraging. We’ve been over in the US a few times but it’s always been very scattered. It’s very different from Europe in terms of getting around and booking shows and stuff. This is the first time we’ve gone there and had it make a lot of sense, too. A lot of shows were sold out, and the ones that weren’t sold out were still pretty packed. That was cool because a lot of these cities we’ve played before, but to maybe three people. New York has always been good to us, but a lot of the others, we’d kind of struggle in. It was cool to see so many people at the shows.
As a working band, I imagine you make most of your money touring and playing shows, which is a very arduous way to live. How do you stay sane?
You’re right, bands do make their money by playing shows, but none of us live off the band. The band is very much a passion project, we all have jobs that support us. Like, I work at a music college. We’ve all got other things. We make a little bit of money from the band every now and again but it’s not really an earner. With that tour in America, it was a successful tour, but it costs so much to get over there, and then when you add visa fees and what not, it’s really difficult to make any money from it. The band takes care of itself, it doesn’t lose money through the year, and because we all have other jobs, there’s no pressure to be like, ‘alright we need to go and play 50 shows this year.’ There was a time when we were thinking we’d just tour forever, but then doing that, there were some mental health issues and we all realized that that just wasn’t an option, and as we get older, we realize that that isn’t really what we want anyway.
You work at a music college, do you work with other bands as well? Like guitar teching or producing?
No, not really. I work in a music college and teach music business. I teach musicians and people who want to work in the industry about copyright and the structure of record deals. It’s a lot of, ‘yeah, you’re not gonna make any money, this is how it works.’ Our bass player does a lot of producing and works with other artists.
You didn’t ever want to give that a go?
I don’t really know anything about the technicalities of recording, like if someone wanted to record with me, it’d be a disaster, whereas Daniel is a professional engineer. For me, I just play in and manage the band, and teach students about how to do that.
I almost assumed you’d all be working with other people because Gilla’s production style, and even more specifically, your pedal board, are things that all the other bands I know gossip about. Bit of a cult following.
Well, thank you, but no. I mean, the drummer is the real tech of the band. I’ve got a load of pedals, sure. I watch a lot of YouTube videos of people demoing them, but I really don’t know what the fucks going on a lot of the time. There’s a signal chain where you’re supposed to go guitar to amp, but I read that backwards, and I got all the pedals looped in backwards, which kind of made most of the sounds that I use, but it’s just from reading it incorrectly. It sounds cool though so it’s alright, but I wouldn’t be much use guitar teching.
Your sound is so specific, and I don’t want to ask about your influence, so what sort of sound do you look for or inspires you? What do you like to hear?
That’s a good question, I don’t know. It’s funny because usually people just ask about influences and you can kind of just rattle them all off.
I know, yeah. That’s what I don’t want.
It’s tricky to say because I like a bit of everything. I do hate doing stuff that sounds really familiar. If I listen to a guitar band and I know exactly how they got that sound, I get less interested.
What do you mean?
If they’re trying to do something- like if they’re making an ambient soundscape and they’ve got reverb on and a bit of drive and they’re just tremolo picking up high, I find that so boring because it’s been done so much. Whereas if I listen to something like Low - the way that that sounds, I just don’t know what’s going on and how they’re making these full, distorted sounds on the track and I get really excited about that. I remember reading this feature on Jai Paul, and the person doing the feature said, ‘the first time I listened to this, I thought my speakers were broken.’ That- I really like that. You can’t really place where the sound is and there are all these hidden little things. At the same time, I also love the sound of a guitar into an amp. I think I like really full, different sounds.
So sounds that aren’t obvious? Original sounds.
Original sounds. Like My Bloody Valentine, that sounds amazing, but when you hear another guitar band doing the whammy guitar thing, you’re like, ‘oh, they’re doing Kevin Shields.’ It loses the magic. There’s something about it, I don’t really know what it is.
There’s mystery.
Yeah, totally. When someone does the ambient tremolo picking thing, it’s like they’ve literally chosen the cheapest most obvious way to do that thing and it immediately pulls me out, whereas if they go about it a different way - and it can be the same notes or whatever - but it sounds kind of different- a bit fuller or a bit more fucked or something, it immediately sounds more interesting to me. I don’t know if I’m explaining that very well because I’ll probably find tons of examples of bands that do that today and I’m like, ‘that sounds great.’
It’s something to do with a creative inability to identify. Music journalists like me are obsessed with classifying and assigning genres, but your band is a challenge because you’re not easily defined or assigned. How do you feel about our compulsion to label your music?
I think it makes total sense, I do it. If I meet someone in a band, I’ll ask what kind of music they make, and I know immediately that they hate that question because it’s a hard one for any artist. I totally get it. You have to say that it roughly exists in this world so people know we aren’t talking about techno or something. I think we’ve always been put in with these genres and as a result I think people get really let down when they listen to us. We get put into certain brackets, like, ‘Gilla is a noise rock band,’ but none of us really listen to noise rock, and when people expect to hear music that’s similar to other noise rock that they like, they hear us and are like, ‘they’re a bit shit.’ If you go in expecting something and it’s not that, you will find it a bit shit. You know what I mean?
Post-punk is the big umbrella lately.
Yeah, people say we are a bit similar to a lot of other bands coming out at the time that are post-punk, we don’t really fit into that either, but people with that perspective might think, ‘ugh, too messy.’ And not that I think our stuff is super out there, we aren’t making some really abstract form of music. We’ve just been labeled so many genres since we started and gotten placed alongside certain bands - really great bands - but I don’t really think we sound like those bands and people get disappointed when they hear us.
What do you listen to? Or what do you compare yourself to?
I try to listen to a lot of whatever is coming out now or what’s going on at the moment. I personally find that very important, I like hearing what’s happening now. We never wanted to sound like whatever the sound was. When we first started, there were a lot of bands in Ireland and the UK who were like, post-post-Strokes. People referred to them as Landfill Indie. We were like 16 or 17 around that time and were trying to make that music, and it was shite. It was terrible and we were terrible. When we started this band, we decided not to do that, and not to do Radiohead. We love Radiohead, but there were a lot of bands that took direct inspiration from In Rainbows. Especially around Dublin, there were tons and tons of bands that were exactly like Radiohead. We didn’t want to do this or that, but everything else was up for grabs, and that was a really important starting point for us as a band, and as we’ve progressed, it’s gotten easier to become a bit more insular, but I think it’s still important to hear what’s going on.
I think this is actually a pretty good time to be a guitar band like you because it’s getting airplay and recognition where for a while in the 2010’s, it wasn’t the cool thing to be. Maybe push back from that post-post-post Strokes.
There are a lot more bands now that have gotten big- a lot more aggressive bands, and that’s great. We get compared to a lot more contemporary bands now than we did say five or eight years ago, so I’m always trying to hear what’s happening and step away from it. I think of it like, if I was starting a band today, I’d try not to sound like what we sound like because there are a lot of bands kind of doing that thing.
It’s a lot to do with the process through which you define yourself. If a band doesn’t go through a defining process, they end up sounding like Landfill. How do you feel about your definition and evolution as a band?
We’re all very proud of it, I think. When we started, we got excited about getting different sounds from our instruments and I think we’ve gotten better at that. When we put out our first album on a label that we really love, that was a big accomplishment. When we put out our second album, that was the first time we had to actually write an album as opposed to just having these songs ready. I’m very proud of this last album because we got a lot more invested in production, flow, song lengths - it’s my favorite out of the three. It doesn’t feel years away from the first record where we’ve skipped across genres, but we’ve kind of opened the door to all these other options. I feel really good about it. What’s nice is that every time we finish a record, we’ve never though, ‘fuck what are we going to do next?’ It’s always been, ‘that was great, we can do better.’
Have your mind blown, here.