21/01/2024
Gilla/Ingen/Chainsaw/Yes
Gilla Band ()
Man/Woman/Chainsaw ()
YES, Manchester
5 December 2023
Download my audio tape here: https://piphanytapes.live/
There are venues with louder soundsystems than that of the incredible YES Pink Room, and there are certainly smaller rooms, and yet sonically, no other space that I’ve visited can quite capture the ecstatic force that one experiences in the sweet spot a few rows from the front there. And few bands can cause one to seek this force in a way that Gilla Band can.
The night was opened by London’s beautiful Man/Woman/Chainsaw, with whose music I fell in love for the first time: I defy you, listener, to witness a song like Back/Burden in the flesh without dissolving into an electric agar jive! [correction: I do not defy you—please see this band if you can.] Every single member exudes a sense of glee and immediacy in both their melodies and their energies, leaving a concert that even through tender and slow moments it’s hard to lose the biggest grin.
As for the headliners... There’s a switch in my brain so rarely touched, but it is tripped by the moment in Shoulderblades where the most absolutely horrible bassline without a single identifiable note kicks in from the wizard on the left Daniel Fox. I don’t know what happens when it kicks in, but I come to about five minutes later exhausted, faint, and battered. I was surprised, then, when it was prematurely triggered by Mr. Fox’s Oscillator that accompanies Post Ryan’s “same old” verse: while I completely lost myself for a few minutes at the time, looking back it’s clear that a brain needs a mechanism to cope with being flanked by such brutality to the left, the searing lance of Alan Duggan’s guitar to the right, and from the middle the skewed subpincer of Adam Faulkner and Dara Kiely rhythmically and verbally commanding the writhing crowd.
I was overwhelmed and depleted entirely by Gilla Band. I don’t like crowds at the best of times. I struggled to stand, sometimes even to breathe, and I was utterly battered. It was very much a “never again” kind of night—I cannot wait to go through it all over again.
Have the loveliest of days,
—e