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| In Waiting album cover |
At the heart of Dublin-based indie quartet Pillow Queens’ debut album, In Waiting, lies a desire for expression. The band have battled long enough against those who want them to ‘do us all a favour and forget how to speak’, as on Child Of Prague, with its thumping bass and Roman Catholic symbols giving us a taste of what’s to come. They’re done waiting.
The opener, Holy Show, marks the start of their journey: ‘I’m still a baby, if you’re still waiting.’ But they soon grow into lovesick ‘teens’, ‘holy ghosting’ on dates, smoking and drinking (‘I roll you up and crack you open’). And it’s clear that they’ve spent time shaping and maturing their sound, with the angst of revealing their truth matched by Cathy McGuinness’s biting guitar: ‘If you remember a thing about it, tell me that it’s not bad/Why’d I even say that?/Show me on the playback.’ This recording is their evidence that they have created something society and the Irish music scene, perhaps, feels shouldn’t quite belong to them: ‘Look what this mouth and teeth have gotten me/A bite of someone else's night.’
On Handsome Wife, packed with energising guitar riffs, Pamela Connolly – who shares lead singer duties with Sarah Corcoran – declares: ‘I may not be the wife you want/But I’m pregnant with the virgin tongue’ despite 'these hands so neat between my teeth’ preventing her from speaking out, with the echo of Holy Show’s teeth imagery demonstrating the band’s masterful use of motifs. Others may not want to hear what she has to say but, luckily for us, she will not ‘admit defeat’: ‘When the right man comes along singing the right song/It’s gonna be me.’ The band recently performed The Cranberries’ song Dreams in a video with other female artists, as the collective Irish Women In Harmony, to raise money for domestic abuse victims while also calling attention to the music industry’s gender imbalance – a recent report from Linda Coogan Byrne revealed a lack of Irish radio airplay and festival slots for female and non-binary musicians.
It is this sense of unity that the band highlights on two of the album’s queerest tracks. Brothers sees them playing with the boundaries of gender again, and explores the anguish of presenting yourself as you want to be seen: ‘There goes the man, I wanna be, I love my brothers and my brothers love me…/Holding up our bodies for sport.’ However, while the instrumentals slow at the line ‘All lined up like a losing team’, the energy of Rachel Lyons’ drumming builds again at the refrain, ‘Hold up your hands, shoulder the weak’, as the band – a chosen family – hold each other up with music.
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| Sarah Corcoran, Pamela Connolly, Cathy McGuinness and Rachel Lyons |
Meanwhile, Gay Girls, which brought Pillow Queens many fans this year when it featured on the soundtrack of the film Dating Amber, takes us back to the days of learning from a first queer love and coming out: ‘I’ll decide while I ride on your coat tails/If I'll hide or delight in your company.’ It plays on the duality between queerness and religious imagery; ‘I spent the whole night/Belly aching about a fire sign’ is suggestive of lesbians’ stereotypical love of astrology, but also a fear of Hell – just as a sense of pride and community is blended with sin (‘Do you wanna be on the cheek of a liar/That roots for you?’). However, once again it is unity and gratitude that wins out, with the heavy, over-enunciated vowels in lines such as ‘I pray for them when I wring my hands’, ‘Holy, holy’, ‘I was a fool, thank you' and 'Marie, Marie, Maria’ echoed in the guitar melodies, and built upon by the unified vocal backing in the outro.
But while being gay in conservative Ireland is marked as challenging, the strongest songs, filled with emotion, transport the listener to the country, and present it as a place of not only struggle, but love, too. Liffey, for instance, proves that Pillow Queens have mastered the art of the grower. The darkest, heaviest track on the album, it is all pounding, stomach-churning guitars which almost drown out Pamela's growls. It’s a tightly produced number, and while sometimes this confusion can get the better of the band, as on the dreamlike Harvey, with its silky soft guitars – is it a reference to Harvey Weinstein, LGBT+ rights activist Harvey Milk, or some unknown entity? – this song feels purposeful in its confusion, as though the listener, too, is lost in the River Liffey. The quiet introduction, which marks it out as different to the earlier single version, makes this quick move from light to dark even starker. Lines such as the refrain, ‘Some day you’ll have my head on a silver plate’ and ‘I want to take you with me, to wash and dry your feet’, ground it firmly in Catholicism, with the alms plate and the devoted religious act of washing feet. But in amongst the noise and fear (‘Don’t do it Daddy, I can see we’ve had enough’) is the search for peace, which is not to be found in religion (‘God give me glory, or don’t, I’ll take my luck’), but instead in the water of their home: ‘Spread me over the Liffey, and sing me off to sleep.’ And as the guitar clears in the outro, we feel peace may be possible, as the listener is led into the gentle closer Donaghmede and another body of water: the ‘warm embrace of the Northern bay’.
The band has saved the best for last – hometown pride hasn’t sounded this good since Adele sung about Tottenham. Pamela sings, 'Stay for a week, in sunny Donaghmede…/And the light is a knife and it cuts right through your eyes,’ as the guitar slowly cuts through the quiet. The track explores the band’s emigration conundrum: ‘Every man leaves, I retreat, I believe it’s good for me,’ juxtaposing belief with the hard truth of ‘Then he gets in for a swim ’cos the water’s good for it’. As Pamela’s voice deepens and becomes more urgent, the temporariness of the trip is firmly banished – ‘Stay in the warm embrace of the Northern bay’ – and the song becomes its own embrace, as the outro gets muffled under reverbing guitars. They aren’t going anywhere.
By moving away from the anger of early singles released after their 2016 formation, such as Rats, Pillow Queens have created a soothing balm for these times. As Sarah sings in HowDoILook, ‘It took a while but I don’t mind’. This album was worth the wait.
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