When I listened to Gichard’s debut album, Chins for Lefty for the first time, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d just heard. I knew I loved it, but my head was full of questions, mostly along the lines of what the hell did it all mean?
Since then, and having listened to the album dozens of times now, I’m still not sure I fully comprehend. And I love it for that. It’s one of these records that probably asks more questions than it answers, and I hear something new or different each time I listen, whether that be a little musical nuance or a rethink of what the lyrics actually mean, sometimes they question the absurdity of life, and are often seemingly obscure. I do believe I may have had some sort of small existential crisis at one point where I began to question all my life decisions, and rethink everything I have ever believed in with some form of nihilistic overthinking… but hey I’m OK… I think.
On a less philosophical note, this album is fucking brilliant. It’s like the bastard offspring of Dry Cleaning and Arab Strap, with elements of bands like Medicine and even, to an extent, Suicide, thrown in here and there. This is exactly the sort of music I love, music that makes you think, lyrics that are clearly not just surface level noise, but go deeper and are perhaps so obscure or enigmatic that at points you can end up reading your own meaning into them.
I’d have to say that due to the often wildly off the wall and nightmarishly cacotopian lyrical tales on this album it feels like the musical equivalent of The Black Mirror. Things start off relatively rationally on Cholesterol Test, the song opens with a mesmerically hypnotic metronomic beat, lulling you into a false sense of security as the mood gradually switches with a repeatedly whispered “sorry” turning into an unsettlingly perturbing sense of self-persecutory paranoia, a questioning stream of consciousness that sounds like a hurriedly recorded voice note laced with self-doubt. That paranoia dials up several notches on Asking the Apes, an edgy and agitatedly antsy song with a fast-paced insistent rhythm, fuzzy bruising guitar lines and a thunderous pounding backbeat perfectly embody that whole limbic chimp brain fight or flight mode at full tilt with an air of desperation and a frantic urgency in the repetitious lyrical phrasing.
Posthumous Hologram has an altogether more chilled and seemingly laidback groove, but all is not as it seems with lyrics reflecting the songs title, imagining a bleakly disturbing future in typical Black Mirror style. This disturbing vision of a dystopian future, or maybe more like a dystopian here and now, continues into songs like Human Resources, one of those that feature twists and turns within, that lyrically lead you down one path before a dramatic turn of events has you heading down a sinister dark alley… At the start of the song, I can almost feel the palpable sense of health and safety reps visibly flinching as they listen to the weird surrealism of the dysfunctional workplace before the true unsettling nature of the lyrics reveals itself.
Splitting these two songs is the melancholically reflective posthumous relationship advice of Break Up with Johnny Dogbirth with a sorrowfully mellow Cowboy Junkies feel to it while Soft Face uses minimalistic arrangement efficaciously with equally minimalistic lyrics that reflect societal biases.
Talking of lyrics, Chins For Lefty features a mix of dryly sardonic dead-pan humour in the vein of Aidan Moffat, with an unyielding repetition of lyrical couplets and phrasings often used with a significant impact throughout. This helps to create a sense of inner turmoil and anguished nervous energy, none more so than in Hamming it Up an intense slow burner with a real surreal feel due to bizarrely offbeat and eccentric storytelling that builds with a dramatic fervency and uneasiness that escalates as the song progresses and fills you with a sense of confusion on whether to laugh nervously at the morbidly dark humour, or be shocked and disturbed at the bleak starkness of it all. The tumultuous build of a cacophony of noise that soundtracks the disturbingly repeated phrasing “if I miss the opening lecture on Increased Sow Longevity, I’ll kill myself” stirs the same sensation as the mournful cries of cattle at the end of Meat of Murder. Brutal but brilliant.
Maybe it’s that existential crisis I mentioned earlier but in some sort of twisted way, the album closer, and single, the fancifully absurd Your Private Hell weirdly has me thinking of a humorously dark and weirdly infernal Christmas Wrapping, the random meetings replacing the forgotten cranberry sauce with a very specific 11 hot dog sausages and carbolic soap… An extraordinary listen, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to hear another album quite like this for the rest of this year… and beyond.
https://gichard.bandcamp.com/album/chins-for-lefty