The East End of London, 2013: dressmaker emerged amidst a foggy haze and the pulse of blinding strobes. If Phil Spector had produced Joy Division instead of girl groups, and drafted Thurston Moore to throw in waves of feedback and chainsaw tone guitars, it might have sounded like this. The aural experience is a cocktail of the ear-piercingly loud, the psychedelic, and at times the serene, with an underlying aura of menace throughout. Drawing comparisons to sonic luminaries such as SWANS, My Bloody Valentine, and The Jesus & Mary Chain, dressmaker have an evident fondness for all things noisy but their music cuts deeper than the cheap trick of depending solely on excessive volume. Their first single, “Skeleton Girl”, is a seven and half a minute voyage through the process of dehumanisation: the vocalist croons memories of a person breathing but no longer alive, guitars hiss with feedback, and the rhythm section weaves an intricate yet robust tapestry. If they don’t break everything in their way we’ll be hearing a lot more about them soon.
