Mull It Over 018: Killer Whales
Experimental Belfast quartet Blue Whale are back with their noisy new album. A launch party in The Black Box follows next month.
‘Last Immediate Images’ is a curious name for an album that is anything but immediate. On their sophomore release (their first in six years) Belfast’s preeminent noisemakers Blue Whale bring us a catalogue of songs that is at times a difficult, fun and intensely chaotic listen.
Subverting the normal avenues well trodden by guitar-based bands, on Last Immediate Images Blue Whale do an incredible job of holding the listener’s attention, if even at some points during its quick ten song run time that attention is holding on for dear life. The music is joyful yet unsettling. There is a humour here, as well, where the band is perversely daring you to have fun amongst the fear. ‘Poor Eddie Ombrophobe’, for example sounds like what can only be described as a dystopian journey through the mind of our protagonist who wishes for nothing but the rain to stop so he can take the dog for a walk. ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’, this is not. On ‘Eight Acres’, the results genuinely sound like what would happen if you took Boards Of Canada’s sinister opus Geogaddi and put it in your NutriBullet on the highest setting.
A game of two halves
Off beat vocal melodies, which are rare, move alongside instrumental and angular guitar work that really only comes up for air once we are well in to side B on the short interlude ‘Twenty-Two’, which leads in to the genuinely sunny ‘I Wanna Be Your Da’. Well, the type of sunny that comes after the rain which I’m guessing eventually did come for poor old Eddie. A Belfast type of sunny.
The second side of Last Immediate Images really is much more of a soft landing than the riff-heavy, percussive experimentation on the reverse. The near 10 minute-long epic ‘Saint of Florists’ is such a beautiful, yearning piece of instrumental scoring that poor Eddie is but a distant memory now as the album drones to its ambient close and you have to stand up just to gather yourself and go and and walk around the kitchen or something.
It is impossible and would be remiss not to mention the generation of ‘post rock’ or ‘post punk’ bands that count Blue Whale amongst their peers in 2024, just as it was in 2018 when they released their debut album Process as the genre was taking hold. Yes, you can hear Black Midi and Squid between these verses. Or maybe it is the other way around? I remember having a conversation with an unnamed member of an unnamed band (I don’t like to name-drop) of the same cohort who explained to me that experimental ‘post’ music, as it were, was not born of South London. Yes, the music press has forever linked this new punk movement to the SW2 postcode, but we need not look east for our atonal, experimental jazz rock. We have Blue Whale; we have Robocobra Quartet right here in sunny Belfast. Still though, I do have fond memories of bumming a cigarette from Lennon Gallagher, son of Lord God Liam and sharing a quick word with Saul Adamczewski of Fat White Family over a Guinness in the now famed Brixton Windmill, the scene’s mecca, back in 2018 at a Pregoblin show. What can I say? I’m a name-dropper.
The whole point of all of the aforementioned bands, however, is that they cannot actually be consigned to any one ‘genre’. Blue Whale have, with the help of Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, who produced Last Immediate Images, gifted us a definitively unique and thoughtful offering. The six year hiatus between records was evidently worth the wait. It is not an easy listen at times. It’s not Rumours. But it is, I believe, an important release for Northern Ireland and for the ‘guitar music’ that it bravely and abrasively pushes forward. My recommendation is that you listen to it immediately.
Blue Whale live at The Black Box : WIN TICKETS
Share the below post on Instagram to be in with a chance of winning two tickets to the Blue Whale Album Launch for Last Immediate Images on Saturday 11th May in The Black Box, as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival.
Thank you for reading the 18th edition of Mull It Over. Things are moving fast and each week it gets more and more fun to bring you this newsletter. A big welcome to all of the new subscribers who have joined in the over the past while. I hope you have been digging through the archive which is now becoming a chunky enough library!
Remember to follow the Spotify playlist below which features all the artists I write about on here and share the articles where you can on your social media. Have a great weekend everybody and happy listening!
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