By Seamus Fitzpatrick
Some rock records are all about the hook melody. Others evolve around the riffs. Gilla Band’s Pugnello asks you to follow raw sounds, and the beat it creates.
That beat matters. For all the distorted bass, processed vocals, electronic noise, samples, and sounds whose instrumental origins become difficult to identify, Pugnello is at its core physical music. Rhythmic figures repeat until they become hypnotic. Layers accumulate around them. Sounds disappear and return in altered forms. Something that initially seems random eventually behaves like a riff, a counterline, or even a structural marker. That is how Gilla Band turn sonic chaos into form.
The Dublin quartet of vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, bassist Daniel Fox, and drummer Adam Faulkner retains the physical interaction of a rock band while increasingly blurring the boundaries among guitar, bass, electronics, samples, voice, and studio processing. Produced by the band, with Fox recording and mixing, Pugnello makes that ambiguity part of its musical vocabulary.
“Placeholder” makes this easy to hear. A four-on-the-floor dance beat establishes the foundation while a distorted bass figure repeats until it becomes hypnotic. Kiely’s speak-sung vocal works rhythmically against that pulse, and additional percussion gradually increases the density. Effects and noise accumulate toward a break, but when the texture reforms, the beat and bass figure restore the song’s identity.
The repetition is deceptive because the music is not standing still. After another break, a variation of the original bass figure appears, while eighth-note patterns establish another hypnotic layer. A three-against-two rhythmic relationship adds further motion to the underlying pulse. Processed spoken material becomes another element of the arrangement rather than simply carrying lyrics.
There is no obligatory giant drop waiting at the end of all that construction. The song develops, transitions, breaks apart, and rebuilds without offering the kind of oversized payoff its accumulation might suggest, and the listener excepts. Gilla Band understand that musical direction and musical resolution are not necessarily the same thing.
“Alogia” is an example of what makes this album a new high for the band as production is inseparable from composition. Moody synths and samples gather in the low end before a repetitive drum-machine figure establishes another pulse. Pedal tones and swells give the texture shape, while Kiely’s processed delivery becomes part of the surrounding sound. A simple “la-la-la” gesture develops into an interaction between lead and backing voices with the character of call and response.
When the form comes around again, its outline remains recognizable, but what occupies that outline has changed. Synths grow around it. Production noise becomes more prominent. Rhythmic variations introduce polyrhythmic tension. Bass, drums, vocals, and other layers are repeatedly recolored by effects.
This is one of Pugnello’s most interesting musical characteristics. Gilla Band can develop an idea without necessarily relying on melody or harmony. They can change its sound. Timbre becomes another compositional parameter.
“The Megazord” puts rhythm closer to the foreground. Repeating samples transform abstract noises into pulse before processed drums establish sixteenth-note motion against a steadier downbeat. More samples enter with rhythmic identities of their own, creating individual layers within an increasingly dense texture.
Kiely’s more aggressive vocal sounds become another rhythmic component. An insistent eighth-note figure gains energy from shifting accents, while noise, samples, bass, and drums compete for space without eliminating the underlying motion. A central passage shifts attention toward layered vocals before drums and cymbals seem to answer them. It resembles call and response, except the conversation occurs among rhythms, textures, and processed sounds rather than conventional melodic phrases.
Calling this “chaos” therefore only describes the surface. The important question is why the music has an arc. On “The Megazord,” additional parts have consequences. Processed wordless vocals increase pressure. Percussion changes the density of the texture. Each new element affects how the existing ones are heard. Accumulation becomes development.
The nearly eight-minute “Crisp Pop” is the band’s focus on sound through a longer form. Vocal samples initially move in counterpoint while reverb and delay turn instrumental sounds into less easily identifiable shapes. Live and programmed percussion combine into a sixteenth-note drive with a backbeat. Bass contributes a guttural processed movement of its own. Kiely’s speak-singing has a more clearly defined melodic shape, while guitar, percussion, and effects progressively enlarge the surrounding field.
And yes, underneath all of this, the track is danceable. That quality is more important than it might initially appear. The beat is not a conventional foundation with experimental sounds pasted over it. Rhythmic stability is one of the things that allows the surrounding sounds to become so unstable. The listener has somewhere to stand while Gilla Band keep moving the walls.
“Crisp Pop” also reveals that accumulation is only half of the band’s vocabulary. A break strips away the accumulated layers and allows drums, bass, and samples to establish another build. Production creates contrast as sounds move between muffled and clearer states. Related vocal rhythms preserve continuity even while the surrounding texture changes.
Eventually, noise itself begins behaving as counterpoint. A processed sound moves against the direction of the other material, producing the sensation that something should resolve. Gilla Band resist giving it the expected resolution, allowing the unresolved tension to become part of the climax.
That moment explains why Pugnello is more compelling than an exercise in unusual production. The effects are equal to melody and rhythm because they acquire musical functions. There is risk in working this way. When every sound is processed, every texture is pushed, and every arrangement is determined to destabilize expectation, extremity can become predictable too. Pugnello is strongest when its transformations feel consequential rather than simply novel. Its refusal of conventional payoff can also leave the listener suspended between purposeful tension and denied release.
But that tension belongs to the album’s musical personality. Gilla Band explores melody, harmony, riffs, or song form. They make those familiar tools share their responsibilities with pulse, density, repetition, processing, and noise. The quartet builds structures, dismantles them, preserves pieces, and reconstructs those pieces in altered forms.
That makes Pugnello both intellectually interesting and surprisingly visceral. You can analyze the polyrhythms, trace the accumulating layers, and listen for the transformations in timbre. Or you can simply feel the pulse underneath everything and allow the sound to do its work.
The chaos is the surface. Underneath it, competing motion becomes architecture. That’s the short of it!
