Listen to the members of Ganser talk about their creative process and you’d swear you were speaking to alchemists. There’s a unique mysticism hidden beneath the Chicago Post Punk quartet’s stoic exterior — a complex network of practices and rituals that results in music you can feel more easily than you can understand.
“Sometimes there isn’t the right thing to say. Throwing language in a blender is the only option,” bassist/vocalist Alicia Gaines writes in Ganser’s official bio. “Looking through randomness like tea leaves, you find meaning in it eventually and work with that.”
Listen to the band’s debut LP, appropriately titled Odd Talk, while scrolling through the lyrics typed up on its Bandcamp page and you’ll feel like a medium yourself, piecing through long lists of short, abstract phrases while attempting to construct a holistic meaning from the mess.
What do you make of a sequence like “realize nothing/bruised knees/salt and vinegar”? The sour, parched feeling your tongue gets after eating overly acidic potato chips? Swirling shades of black and blue? Let these syllables simmer in a vat of astringent Goth Rock riffage and frenetic Punk percussion and give it another taste. Ganser’s spoken-word poetry conveys meaning through the residue it leaves behind: dreamlike and jarring.
“There’s this point where the feelings you’ve let fester below the surface start to grow legs and gain autonomy,” says keyboardist/vocalist Nadia Garofalo in the same bio.
It’s absurd how many of Ganser’s quotes read like the ramblings of cartoon mad scientists.
Despite their heady, avant-garde ambitions, the band is more than capable of giving the Punk masses what they want: fast-paced, mosh-able nuggets that just barely flirt with emotional transparency. The droning “Aubergine” is the best of these, channeling the gloomy atonality of The Cure’s early work while keeping the distortion cranked to the maximum. Danceable as it may be, the track is a lyrical challenge to the listener: a faraway taunt — “Stay if you’ll find me/You’ll never find me.”
If you’re up for a game of cat-and-mouse between artist and observer, look no further than Sunday’s show to throw your hat into the ring.
Click here for more show info.
This article appears in Aug 1-8, 2018.
