Giglinger

Reviews

Giglinger React 12″

If you’re familiar with GIGLINGER, this may be a far cry from your expectations…React starts off with an eight-minute track (the shortest of the four cuts is five-and-a-half) that mixes post-punk with jammy psychedelic noise rock. Am I at rave? A cavern in hell? Right, Finland.  Looking back on their discography, I found a totally different band—straightforward, lo-fi punk that was great!  Take, for example, their full-length cassette 13 from 2021, that is two sides of riff-driven, fast-paced punk rock, like a group that enjoys the DAMNED. Whether these slower, longer, more spacious songs (with a much cleaner production) are a new beginning for GIGLINGER or an experimental layover, I don’t know.  I like parts of this, and I’m reluctantly pigeonholing the band by saying I miss the heart found in previous releases. But hey, they’ve been at it over two decades; it’s your band, get weird!

Giglinger 13 cassette

A long-running Finnish outfit that has remained primarily under the radar, GIGLINGER seems content to keep plugging away at bare-bones punk rock with a distinct dark Euro vibe. Classic Finnish punk (not hardcore, punk) with touches of M.O.T.O. and EA80 makes for a compelling lo-fi listening experience. I didn’t know much of the band before this tape came across my desk, but I’m about to get hooked into a modest discography that spans more than two decades.

Giglinger Money, Power, and Corruption / Pay No More 10″

This is a release of two three-song EPs from this long-standing Finnish smart punk outfit. They got the licks, but they got the lyrics too. Just dirty grungy anthemic punk rock with an anarcho-political bent, sounds like the ’80s all over again.