CLUAS | Blogs | French Letter - Gush: diamond geysers!
At first glance, Parisian four-piece Gush seem like a French equivalent to Kings Of Leon. The band members are all related - brothers Xavier and Vincent Polycarpe plus their cousins Mathieu Parnaud and Yan Gorodetzky. Also, their fashion sense is more back-woods than Left Bank: shaggy hair, vintage leather and the sort of long-sleeve, round-neck, three-button T-shirt that Grizzly Adams would wear as an undergarment.
But soundwise Gush (right) don't follow the Followills down the road of southern-fried blues-rock. The four French lads are certainly retro, but their thing is post-Beatles pop and folk-rock - say, the very early Lennon or McCartney solo stuff, later Beach Boys or a bit of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The storming semi-acoustic rocker 'No Way', reinforced with steely harmonies, shows the strength of those influences to best effect. Still, don't discount the novelty of Frenchmen who actually sing and write melodies.
Gush are starting to make a stir in France. Recently they released their first album, 'Everybody's God' (Irish music fans may remember a Donegal band called Georgia who had a record of the same name in the early '90s) and an upcoming Paris show at the sizeable Cigale has already sold out. Now they're picking up airplay with a strange and distinctive single that's a little different to the rest of their tracks.
On paper, 'Let's Burn Again' promises to be vastly uncool - it has the upper-register backing harmonies and staccato keyboards of mid-Atlantic, middle-of-the-road '70s pop. Fortunately, music isn't made on paper: 'Let's Burn Again' sounds so odd and unhip that it's almost fascinating, especially when you try to match the sound to the look of the band.
Baaaaaaaaad band name! Although I suppose we should be glad it has nothing to do with Shetland Ponies or Shergar descendants.
I like the retro cool of 'Let's Burn Again' but jaysus the lyrics are woeful....For future reference lads, don't talk about morning breath and getting sick if you're envisaging 'burning' in any sense other than the 'crash and...' one.
Sailing a little too close to the Doobies wind for my likes. Perhaps a better proposition live.
Compared to most of the baptismal-font-disasters I have to cover for this blog, Gush is as good as it gets. At least they're not called Poni Pony Poney, or whatever.
And 'morning breath' lyrics are poetry compared to the 'shackles/jackals' rubbish of Irish indie's current flavour-of-the-minute, Villagers.