White Heat Presents Girls Names

Northern Ireland's Girls Names return with their third full-length album, 'Arms Around a Vision'. On 'Arms Around a Vision', they're more widescreen than ever but also more direct and aggressive. The bass, drums and guitars are still there, but so are saxophones, organs, detuned broken guitars and pianos, and even sheets of metal assaulted with hammers. Conceptually, 'Arms Around a Vision' acts as a love letter to European elegance - Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, Germany's Zero Group and both Neubauten and Bowie's Berlin. Love and pain, romance and fucking. It's all in there somewhere. Grand claims, perhaps, but in an ever bleak world, why not skygaze? The album opens with 'Reticence', a song in two parts that's half metallic knockout, half midnight swagger. It sounds unlike anything they've ever done before, and is a perfect primer for an album that treads a course between Eno-era Roxy sleaze, Birthday Party dissonance and M.E.S' three R's: repetition, repetition, repetition. For fans of The Horrors, These New Puritans, The Cure, Savages, Deerhunter, Toy, Ice Age, Fire Engines, Wire etc. - Rough Trade