Gilla BandRoad to Nowhere★★★⯪Gilla Band’s obliqueness works because they never break character. At All Together Now there’s no stage banter, no introductions, barely even an acknowledgment of the audience. The band appears as silhouettes against a red screen, bathed in a wash of pure noise, their faces obscured throughout while only faint variations – illegible script, spreading ink-like stains – strobe across the backdrop. Gilla Band are committed absolutely to the atmosphere they create.That atmosphere is aggressive but strangely seductive: industrial, claustrophobic music that envelops you with a richness and darkness. The songs advance through repetition with the inexorable logic of a nightmare. Their Dadaist lyrics resist interpretation. “A kerfuffle with the psycho muscle, psycho muscle, psycho muscle,” Dara Kiely chants on Post Ryan. Lawman transforms the crowd into a pogoing, surging mosh pit through the repeated refrain: “I used to be good looking”. Meaning in these songs is elusive, highly personal, evoked through images, texture and accumulation.Kiely is the band’s indispensable focal point. Switching between a conventional microphone and a bass drum mic that grotesquely distorts his voice, he staggers across the stage howling like a wounded man. His face in profile is genuinely agonised, evoking hell and psychosis, but underneath the desperation it’s hard not to suspect a lingering sense of the absurd. Somehow, and despite little evidence in the new material, you feel that this is someone with a great sense of humour. The closing Eight Fivers is proof of it: the song is still an absolute banger, an angry recitation of the banal events of life under late capitalism: “I went to Lidl, I went to Aldi, I went to Eason’s ...” sung with the charming looseness of someone long past caring.The only weakness lay in the prominence of the new material from Pugnello. Where Gilla Band’s best songs reach a hard-won beauty, the new material lacks clarity and becomes repetitive.