ALBUM REVIEW: Girls In Synthesis – The Rest Is Distraction
(Own It/Cargo Records)
Girls In Synthesis are an experimental post-punk band from London who have become one of the scene’s most important acts in the last few years.
Formed in 2016, the three-piece created a stir with a series of self-released EPs before unleashing their debut album Now Here’s An Echo From Your Future (reviewed here) in 2020.
Now, after giving us a taste of a new direction with the even denser, darker Konsumrausch mini-album (reviewed here) in the summer, they’re back with album number two.
And what an album it is. Intense doesn’t even begin to sum up the swathes of astonishingly powerful noise-rock they have come up with on The Rest Is Distraction.
John Linger (lead vocals and bass), James Cubit (vocals and guitar) and Nicole Pinto (drums) take elements of anarcho-punk, noise-rock and post-punk and throw it all in a blender.
Recorded last year amid the uncertainty of continuous lockdowns as a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic, this album is far darker in content than its predecessor.
Exploring internal and mental struggles rather than external current affairs, it focuses on the claustrophobia of emotional anguish which many felt during the pandemic.
The album roars immediately into life with It’s All Beginning To Change, with shimmering guitar, juddering bass lines and disjointed drum patterns rolling in like a tidal wave before exploding into a tsunami of noise.
It bristles with the sense of unease which has become the band’s trademark, and is followed by the even spikier Watch With Mother which speaks of “memories so vivid I can taste my childhood/the good, the bad. the indifferent.”
The same’s the case on the jagged Total Control, where “the family’s even turned their back on you/they can’t believe that you were one of them” and “the only thing you’ve managed to achieve is hate”.
The frantic Swallowed Pill and the industrial-sounding Screaming are unanswered cries for help, while My Husband, punctuated by discordant guitar, is set against a background of domestic abuse.
Cottage Industry is what Linger calls “our version of a pop song”. If so, it’s a pretty bleak one, about growing up in a toxic, damaging household and concluding: “Home is where the hate is bred.”
Crippling anxiety is the subject of Not As I Do, which sounds as accessible as GIS ever have, while self-worth again comes under the microscope in Lacking Bite.
Your Prayers Have Changed ups the angst as we near the end, before brooding closer To A Fault takes the feeling of claustrophobia which is present throughout the record to a new level.
The Rest Is Distraction certainly isn’t an easy listen, but it’s a very rewarding one. Some may find its repetition and sheer visceral noise a bit challenging. I think it’s magnificent. 9/10.
