Girls Names
Stains On Silence

Rarely do I venture into reviewing albums released in the new century, times that hardly belong to me in terms of attitude, taste, and competence. In the case of Belfast's Girls Names, I feel I can make an exception, having followed them since their beginnings. Perhaps it's because of their very vague inclination towards the Postcard sound or their vocation for reworking post-punk through new languages. In any case, I had grown quite fond of them, just a moment before their dissolution, which followed only a few months after the release of their latest album to date, "Stains on Silence." Before that, there were the surfer-chic beginnings of "You should know by now" in 2010 and "Dead to me" the following year, and then the "real boom" with the epic "The New Life" in 2013. Here the derivative kraut rock of bands like Toy and Factory Floor perfectly married the dreamy shoegaze of models like Breathless and Slowdive. The album of consecration was thus supposed to be for Girls Names that "Arms around a vision" of 2015. Instead, the album further disoriented critics and fans, in its jagged return to the past through very "wave" sounds that, brace yourselves, even recalled the early Stranglers!

Much was expected from "Stains on Silence," perhaps too much. The band itself seemed disoriented by the path that Cathal Culling, the band's leader, wanted to pursue. Internal tensions were palpable. And probably bassist Claire Miskimmin was right to be puzzled live on social media. Because she sensed that Cathal was now sitting in his dark room, busy vivisecting the album's tracks in a process of deconstruction and reassembly of what the band had recorded the year before. No one knew exactly where it would lead, "if" it would lead anywhere.

For this reason, "Stains on Silence," an album with a troubled gestation, reveals itself as a leap forward without a safety net. Borrowing from the past is something that Girls Names had shown they could do quite well. Transforming their influences into a unique and completely original entity is decidedly more challenging. And it's what the "Girls Names" and particularly Culling are trying to do, not without difficulty. The songs go in this direction, but even defining them as such is really approximate.

From the languid opening of "25," which takes all the time necessary to become a song, after a long opening from a 70s Comedy Drama. Slow hypnotic as only a "Seventeen Seconds" of the third millennium could be, punctuated by a light piano like a shadow on a carpet of synthesizers. In my opinion, it's a great piece and immediately sets the tone for the entire album. Here the guitars are used to create layers of chords rather than melodic lines and the synthetic drumming becomes the protagonist. Exactly as in "Haus Proud," equally doom and dreampop, deliberately fragmentary and fragmented. Two doses of New Order era Movement, a dash of Bad Seeds and the ghost of Martin Hannett sitting at the mixer recomposing the collage. The reassuring jangle pop fragments completely disappear and instead post-rock suggestions advance in a disorderly manner. Where have the Girls Names we knew gone? Certainly not in "The Process," an unstable state of mind, a perplexed bass line that supports plaintive guitars. I'd say vaguely Bauhaus, perhaps for the spectral voice which becomes even more interlocutory when, in the tail, a sort of white warmth settles on the song. No melody to support the effort. And what about the gallop halfway through "The Impaled Mystique" and that very "Cure" guitar that suddenly stops for a breathless pause, just before getting lost in sweet coldwave reminiscences.

The new sound of Girls Names thus strongly veers in favor of a slow psychedelic delirium and an almost daring experimentalism. The musicality is partially compromised and the guitar progressions that made the band famous in the past are just a memory. A sort of "almost immobility" reigns. For example, at the opening of the second side, the slow march of "Fragments of a portrait" is direct evidence. An "ambient" carpet of percussion and guitar, of notes scattered without order as if they were shards on a floor. Cathal's singing first becomes a recitation and then disappears definitively, far in the echo. Sublime in this regard is the epic title track that distills the elements present throughout the album and drags them without haste into a six-minute, melancholic and irresistible crescendo. Almost a "Decades" many years later. Or like in the more reassuring and concluding "Karoline," chosen as the "hypothetical" leading single. Even here, the instrumental tension never wanes and the melody emerges almost reluctantly from a vaguely motorik sound carpet.

The impression at the end of the album is that of not having understood much and having to listen to it again to form an idea. At a first listen, nothing remains in memory, only fragments and suggestions. But this time it's not a flaw of banality, quite the opposite. We are not in the realm of Arctic Monkeys or Editors here. With "Stains on Silence" the band has raised the bar excessively and touches its stylistic-creative peak. But then it implodes and ends up canceling its own future. A step in no particular direction thus, an inevitably concluding record. And the charm of the work lies precisely in this attempt at elevation, an extreme synthesis process that caused detachment, among the band members above all. And then from the traditional indie pop canons which made them part of a movement from which the band definitively distances itself. A one-way journey to an unknown destination that of Girls Names, I will surely miss them. "Stains on Silence" was a real flop on all levels, a "commercial suicide" Colin Newman of Wire would have said. Even if listened to very little and criticized, often without depth, the album should absolutely be recovered. It is an epitaph of the short and intense journey of Girls Names in alternative music in recent years, in my opinion, one of the few truly worth having followed.