This year, I’ve wandered between venues as much as I can, paying little heed to schedules and researching bands as little as possible. Having said that, I had heard about Girl Band and decided to check them out at Gaukurinn. Despite my already high expectations, Girl Band absolutely blew me away!
This Irish band of misfits filled me with an explosive urge to jump around manically, spill my beer everywhere, leave my friends behind and just subsist in the moment, taking it all in. Their lack of melodies, unorthodox song structure, whiny-cum-shouty vocals, and amazing bass guitar (which was scratched, turntable style) rendered me musically deaf for a good part of the night. I talked through the whole next set with a bunch of other equally impressed music-goers, searching for words that could encompass how touched I was (sorry Spray Paint).
They were the absolutely best band at Airwaves. I’m sorry Future Islands, I’m sorry The Knife, both of you will probably play good sets tonight. But Girl Band were better.
They are the shit. Go to their BandCamp and download their digital single ‘De Bom Bom’ right now.
Since we’re on the subject of bests, here are a few others from the last three days of the festival:
- Shortest queue: Gaukurinn on Wednesday. I went in to see Svartidauði and was worried I wouldn’t get in, but there was no queue to speak of, which surprised me as Svartidauði is a stellar death metal band.
- Longest queue: Gamla Bíó on Thursday. Getting to see Mammút proved to a lot more troublesome than I had anticipated, as the queue stretched out all the way around the block, with around two times as many people outside than inside the venue itself. It’s no surprise: this is Mammút we’re talking about here, an art-rock band that’s really turning heads and getting love from all over. Unsurprisingly they finished the set with their hit song, “Salt,” as they have for the past year.
- Most unfortunate beer spill: Muck at Húrra on Wednesday. Drinks get spilled at gigs, this is life, but when Muck’s monitor was beer-bombed, it fried and blew the fuse. It may only have taken two minutes to fix it, but it felt like an eternity.
- Most childish tone on a serious subject: Yahya Hassan. This controversial young Danish-Palestinian’s poetic delivery felt absolutely out of sync with the subjects he was talking about, as he looked like a ten-year-old reading aloud to his whole class about serious things like bad parenting, religion, adolescence, shame and sin. It was brilliant.
- Most failure-prone equipment: Fufanu at Gamla Bíó on Thursday. Oh boy, I love Fufanu, but they ended up playing the same song three times due to a malfunctioning laptop. It was a real clusterfuck of a situation, but they powered through and put on a good show.
- Most danceable set: La Luz. These gals played surf music like none other, and inspired the crowd to dance merrily. It was swell.
- Weirdest dream logic rant music: Ghostigital’s set on Wednesday at Húrra. Einar Örn’s stream-of-thought performance, coupled with Curver’s electronic music was a bit like watching creepy twins that complete each other’s sentences (but in a good way).
- Most well-known choruses: Agent Fresco at Gaukurinn on Friday. These math rockers have been around for a while and have a plethora of catchy choruses. When they played at Gaukurinn, the whole room seemed to be singing or humming along.
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