What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
March: Girl Band — The Early Years EP
I think it’s fair to say I’m a perfectionist. And not the proud kind; not someone who’s appreciative of the handy response to “What’s your greatest weakness?” in a job interview, but someone whose self-imposed standards for even minimal tasks often leave them feeling failure. Perfectionism and its plague of stress and exhaustion tend to reach a boiling point for me in spring when work demands escalate before a hulking June deadline. The world starts to feel like quicksand.
It was around this time I received a press release announcing the debut EP from Irish four-piece Girl Band. As late-night office hours bent into early morning, its 20 minutes of surging, white-knuckled, militant outbursts shook me awake and blew off steam. I listened again and again and again—proud of myself for liking something so aggressive; liking that I had some bite.
Seeing the band live a few weeks later in an over-capacity club at SXSW felt like permission to attack what laid ahead. Dara Kiely—the young, glassy-eyed, mopped-hair frontman I had seen in press photos—now looked electrocuted by passion, screaming until I was sure he was going to pass out. (He didn’t, but I’d later learn the band’s subsequent and equally excellent full-length was inspired by his self-described “psychotic episode”–this now makes sense.) Despite creating total upheaval onstage, he and his band mates never lost sight of their direction. Songs kept lurching forward.
So here was Girl Band—red-faced, bruised, unpretty, wailing, laying everything they have on the table. They’re trying really hard. Watching them, my self-despised compulsion to treat work with life-or-death effort found a sense of camaraderie. When you care so much about something, maybe gracefulness and ease can be overrated. Let them see you sweat.—Lauren Beck