A band that defy explanation, Freya Saulsbury Martin watches as Irish quintet Just Mustard cast a spell over Nottingham's Bodega.
As the haunting first notes of 23 begin and vocalist Katie Ball begins to sing, a soft spell falls over the crowd assembled at The Bodega. Bathed in a ghostly blue light, a low, saw-like whine is revealed to be guitarist Mete Kalyon playing his guitar with a bow, upright like a cello, creating an inexplicably soothing yet menacing sound that forms the undertone of this opening track.
A contradictory and mind-bending fusion of shoe-gaze, industrial rock and new-wave
experimentation, Just Mustard are an Irish 5-piece band who use their live sets to craft engulfing and
hypnotic soundscapes, exploring the very extremes of their instruments and submerging you in their
music on the way. The musicians push their instruments to the limits of their capabilities, as seen
already in Kalyon’s unexpected technique, constructing and eerie and all-consuming soundscape
that support and encircle Ball’s brooding, childlike vocals. The gradual layering of textures,
combining the two counteractive guitars of Kalyon and David Noonan with the deadened plucking of
the band’s two albums, a hypnotic track of baffling sounds that completely captivates me.
Heart Under, released on Partisan Records alongside their compatriots Fontaines D.C., is the second
offering from Just Mustard, a more complex exploration of their instruments, and the textures that
they are able to create with them, largely discovered through lockdown-era experimentation and
bedroom recording. The result is a slower and more deeply thought-out record than their debut, a
gradual and painstaking collection of sounds and textures which veer from brutalist to fluid and
meandering, in complement to the soft and spectral vocals of Ball.
Onstage, the band have an air of quiet separation, barely interacting with their audience yet not in a
way that may suggest superiority or boredom, but merely due to a sense of complete involvement in
the music and the atmosphere they have created. Ball commands the room without the need to say
a word, her small form dressed head to toe in black while her delicate features settle under a jet-
black fringe. As she croons in her high, haunting voice, she gazes out across the room away into
somewhere inaccessible, or retreats to a private place behind her eyes.
"The musicians push their instruments to the limits of their capabilities, as seen already in Kalyon’s unexpected technique, constructing and eerie and all-consuming soundscape that support and encircle Ball’s brooding, childlike vocals."
Ball’s voice is perfectly employed in I Am You, her lilting, dissonant tones providing and unsettling,
nursery-thyme quality to the more staid and murky drone of Clarke’s bass and Shane Maguire’s
juxtaposition of industrial and dense instrumentation with the repetitive, crystalline vocals create a
vast and overwhelming live sound, a full body experience which, as my companion proclaimed, “left
her Geordie knees quaking”.
Frank, perhaps the band’s most well-known track, is one of the standouts of the set, much richer in
texture and layers played live than the recording may suggest, a growing expanse of sound and
repeated vocals creating a delicious sense of tension while the band is bathed in grey and white
lights. Colour and imagery are clearly evocative and key to the writing process and delivery of Just
Mustard’s music, Blue Chalk living up to its name as it builds to a perplexing and thick blue fever
dream, transporting you to somewhere else entirely.
Just Mustard’s music is visceral, dark and beautiful, immediately create a sense of celestial escape,
their siren-like sound irresistibly drawing you in. A complete dream and journey of a live show.
Freya Saulsbury Martin
Edited by: Jodie Averis
Cover image courtesy of Stereo Gum.
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