The Exchange – 14th September 2022
Just Mustard – Irish rock band and Fontaines D.C.’s protégés – hit the stage like a one-punch knockout. With hauntingly blank eyes, the band’s porcelain banshee – frontwoman Katie Ball – sings like a possessed doll and moves like she’s on strings. If she was in a horror film, she’d be the last girl standing.
They’re a group people don’t see half-heartedly; think what would happen if Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins met down a dark alley. Their music is twisted, their gigs the lived equivalent of an emergency siren.
Ball plays these perverse lullabies loud enough that they bounce off the walls and hit her back square in the jaw. She barely notices the crowd in front of her, despite it being a swarm of biblical proportions. People climb the walls for a better view of one of the country’s fastest rising bands. They are the ones to watch; the ones to be afraid of.
The effect is put on coals by the band’s guitarist Mete Kalyoncuoğlu, who plays his instrument with a violin bow. It adds the scrawl to Just Mustard’s inimitable signature, in the darkest of electric elegies like ‘23’ or ‘I Am You’. Like watching someone shake hands with a chainsaw, Just Mustard uses every horror in their arsenal to keep all eyes on them.
Their wailing, werewolf sound resonates with anyone with a heart capable of beating out of its chest. A person from every period of life comes out to see them, but none quite fit what one would expect of the band’s demographic. Then again, there’s nothing predictable about Just Mustard.
As performers, it’s like watching angels sing. Angels singing, of course, as if they’ve just been locked out of heaven.
If you’re interested in music that could cut through bone, you’d be mad to miss them. Then again, perhaps you’d be mad to go.
@katejeffrie 
@ilnsimages
