MINI-ALBUM REVIEW: Girls In Synthesis – Konsumrausch (Hound Gawd!)
London-based trio Girls In Synthesis are back with their first new release since last summer’s Shift In State mini-album, and it’s a record which will have noise-lovers salivating.
Since their formation in 2016, their output has taken in anarcho-punk, noise-rock, post-punk and electronic influences, without being pigeonholed into any of those genres.
They’ve been wonderfully described as “looking more like a terror cell than a rock group”, and their debut album proper Now Here’s An Echo From Your Future (reviewed here) did little to alter that perception.
This exclusive standalone mini-album for German label Hound Gawd! Records explores various sonic territories and expands on the group’s previous releases by adding even more experimentation.
The five-track release, limited to 500 vinyl copies, opens with the nine-and-a-half-minute Pulling Teeth, which occupies all of side one. Released digitally last November as a single, it has already become the magnificent centrepiece of GIS live shows.
In truth it’s three songs in one, melding sludgy noise-rock, musique concrete and banging disco. A real assault on the senses with its throbbing bass, clattering drums, jarring industrial noises and repetitive and at-times-competing vocals, and it’s one of their finest pieces of work yet.
Kicking off side two is Enveloped, also released as a single, and based around an industrial-edged drum machine loop, but swapping the usual guitars for grinding, churning organ. It’s bleak beyond belief, but another excellent addition to their canon.
Next up is Bypassing, another song rooted in electronica, with shards of jagged noise interjecting over a rhythmic beat, while lyrically it explores the destructive focus on nostalgia and mental struggle, before concluding “extra baggage to be left…behind”. It reminds me a little of early 80s punks Chron Gen – remember them?
Interlude, coming in at less than a minute, is more poem than song, with spoken word lyrics jostling for space with unsettling synths and field recordings of London public transport and a payoff of “smile you miserable fucker, it’s not that bad – it can’t be that bad”.
Final track The Engine is a return to the guitar-led sound of early Girls In Synthesis releases, but strips away most of the noise and feedback to leave a more angular framework over which themes of anxiety, nostalgia and claustrophobia are explored.
Girls In Synthesis are John Linger on lead vocals and bass, James Cubit on vocals and guitar and Nicole Pinto on drums. And Konsumrausch? It’s German for ‘shopping frenzy’, which pretty much sums up the way the government hopes the UK will somehow spend its way out of the recession looming in the wake of Brexit, Covid and soaring food, fuel and energy prices.
- You can order Konsumrausch by Girls In Synthesis digitally or on limited edition 12in vinyl from their Bandcamp page HERE.
