Album review: Wot Gorilla? – Stay Home

Whether consciously or not, Wot Gorilla? are dealing heavily with absurdity on their first album in 15 years. Even the title nods towards it, gesturing to a phrase synonymous with one of the weirdest times in collective memory (which, coincidentally, is almost as far back as some of these new songs date). Amid a whirl of wobbly riffs and a never-ending game of hopscotch between time signatures, the Halifax noiseniks are absorbing and wielding that sense of absurdity for themselves.

Stay Home almost disguises its own density at times with a bright, skippy sensibility to its winding guitar lines, often juxtaposing subject matter that’s not exactly a laugh a minute. Clowns epitomises this by contrasting its major key fretwork with lyrics about the bewildering inaction by governments on climate change – ‘Common sense is in short supply / That’s why we’re all going to die,‘ declares vocalist and guitarist Mat Haigh. ‘You were bleeding out on the floor / And I stood and watched,‘ is one similarly blunt epithet on the intricate, maze-like passages of Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Living Here. Most pointed is No Side To Sit, which confronts the apathy of both governments and individuals numbly scrolling past the horrors unfolding in Palestine. ‘How many people have to die for them to see that it’s not right?’

Bleak it may be, but Wot Gorilla? have plenty of prisms to filter it through. There’s moments of jittery weirdness, eccentric melodies, even a twinkly orchestral coda at one point. Young Man’s Game, which contemplates how band life changes when you’re in it as an older person, at one point takes on the energy of what is essentially prog samba. It’s not going to be every listener’s bag, but it was never trying to be so – it’s its own unique, colourful window into how a group of people handle the headache of modern living.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Coheed & Cambria, The Callous Daoboys, The Armed

Stay Home is released on February 20 via Drongo.