Baston – Gesture EP
[sic] magazine, fast becoming an authority on all things French due to the number of Gallic grumblers hitting our pages, is psyched, quite literally, then to spill les haricots on Baston, a trio out of Rennes, who may just be the best yet uncovered. True to those that have recently featured on the site, and following a tidy single in 2014 on the amusingly titled Croque Macadam label, the band’s seven-track Gesture EP has a little of Wild Raccoon’s neat garage melodies, a nod or two to Volage’s Ty Segall-istic, under-produced fuzz, as well as his catchy-as-hell choruses, and throughout the recording there’s a trashy surfabilly guitar playing havoc like 2Sisters, but the EP is also much more.
Stand-out cut “(It’s Complicated With) Jacques Vaché”, for example, blinds during its opening bars with outrageously shiny surf, then – surprisingly – it contorts into an undiscovered baggy anthem that James would be pleased to call his own! It’s really a rather striking mash-up, its later swaggering indie-rock stomp even bringing to mind Doves in their pomp. The Beach Boys classic “Little Honda ‘64” is given a face-lift too, its joyous guitars fed through a downbeat Raveonettes filter.
Parsed by an experimental set of pensive, red-lining jangles that approach pure feedback yet somehow still recalls a forgotten lullaby, a triumvirate of bleary-eyed kraut jams lock in for good measure to boot, their persistence playing off the natural sounding, if washed-out, English-language vocal nicely. Square-jawed repeats dominate, fading in and of prominence as per DIIV or Girls Names. On “Decay” a super-reverbed post-punk guitar line arpeggiates the scales to break the oppression. In turn, “Gefahr” has its eyes on The Horrors’ “Sea Within A Sea”. It’s a strong, seven-minute indie-kraut jam on which to close, suggesting perhaps that these boys should have been at Liverpool Psyche Fest this weekend, a kaleidoscopic projection distorting footage of big wave riders and intergalactic explorers simultaneously. Gesture really is quite something. At times it’s almost like surfin’ the space-time continuum. .
Best track: “(It’s Complicated With) Jacques Vaché”
~The Gesture EP is out now on Howlin Banana.~