Album Review: Age of Indignation by September Girls

2014's Cursing the Sea did just enough to flag the potential of this Dublin five piece: their shadowy debut was sharply styled but that winning aesthetic alone couldn’t quite sustain an album ultimately light of a few killer hooks. Age of Indignation is a convincing and credible advance, and September Girls return with their songcraft finely honed. The title track's ferocious guitars; the feral, tempo-switching Catholic Guilt; opener Ghost with its blistering wig-out coda: this is high-stakes, dark pop.

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On their debut album, Dublin five-piece September Girls delivered their take on dreamy, wall-of-sound shoegaze. It had plenty of bite, but on its follow-up, they’ve developed a stronger sense of anger and menace. Jaw On The Floor, which features guest vocals from A Place To Bury Strangers’ Oliver Ackermann, hinges on a thunderous, lurching bassline as Caoimhe Derwin and Jessie Ward-O’Sullivan’s guitar riffs cut through like stinging curtains of rain.

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When September Girls put out their debut full-length in the traditional release graveyard of January a couple of years back, there was a real self-assurance about it. The aesthetic was clearly well in place, anyway, with walls of reverb, washed-out vocals, and melodic guitars plucked straight from The Velvet Underground. The Dubliners were hardly reinventing the wheel, or even offering anything particularly novel to a market already well saturated with sonic palettes of that kind, but there was a verve to the way in which they pulled it off that meant Cursing the Sea still lingered in the memory by the time the end-of-year lists were being constructed, a feat requiring a fair bit of staying power these days.

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Noisy Irish quintet September Girls shed any remaining indie pop affectations on their cavernous sophomore album, Age of Indignation. It's a sound that was hinted at on their 2014 EP, Veneer, but arrives here more fully formed in a sprawling mass of tension and anger. While their debut was largely a self-recorded affair akin to the type of lo-fi, girl-group, and garage pop of bands like Dum Dum Girls and Vivian Girls, Age of Indignation's vaulting presence was honed in a proper Dublin recording studio, though it would be a stretch to call the album polished.

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