Drahla’s ‘Angeltape’: Album Review

Over the years “post-punk” has become nearly as vague a term as “post-modern,” but it generally refers to a brittle, guitar-heavy sound with choppy rhythms as practiced by such late-‘70s British outfits as Public Image Ltd., Gang of Four, the Fall, Joy Division, This Heat and others. If the sound had a home base, it would probably be the Northern English industrial city of Leeds, which not coincidentally is also home to several major universities and spawned such major acts in the genre as Gang of Four, the Mekons, Delta 5 and more.

On “Angeltape,” the quartet Drahla has revived that sound with a striking level of authenticity — they’re even from Leeds. The album is filled with dueling guitars playing serrated chords, trebly bass, choppy and complex rhythms, a blaring saxophone and Luciel Brown’s vocals, which veer from blasé to a hilariously girlie mock-naivite that perfectly matches the sound — and some of this album’s peak moments are when all of those elements are in your face at the same time, like at the end of “Lipsynch.”

Drahla is not a new band — they began dropping singles in 2016, started leaning into post-punk a couple of years later and although their 2019 debut album, “Useless Coordinates,” is good, they’ve gotten a lot better. The sound can grow repetitive over the course of an album but they work to mix things up, shifting tempos as things progress and using vocal effects, like at the end of “Talking Radiance.”

According to the press notes, the band faced some challenges during the pandemic that are reflected in the music in an unspecified way, but judging by the sound of “Angeltape,” they seem to have turned them into a positive.