Gichard - Chins For Lefty Gichard

Our Album Of The Month is a brand new record by a brand new group, Glasgow’s Gichard. Chins For Lefty makes sense because it makes no sense: effortlessly hummable indie pop detoured by cosmic synth passages, cassette demo punk with a kind of TVPs ramshackleness. The rolling, open-ended lyricism of Dry Cleaning if they were from, I dunno, Dumbarton. 

From out of nowhere, if the darkest, weirdest parts of Glasgow count as nowhere, come Gichard. Like all the greatest outsiders, Gichard are awkward, unusual and also have accidentally made a classic outsider Pop record that reeks of Central Scotland and all its vagaries. It’s psychedelic trips to the moon with a droll, drawling poet/singer helmswoman in Lisa Jones, guitarist/producer Chas Lalli’s melodic lines criss-crossing beautifully underneath. It’s surreal kitchen sink dramas, science fiction played out on the mean streets of Pollokshields, eminently hummable, accidental Indie Pop anthems falling over themselves on degrading 4-track cassette spools. 

What’s in a name anyway? Gichard take a lot of pleasure in being just a bit “not right.” It’s “Richard” but with a G. A Christian name barked by a dog. For sure if they’d called themselves something cute and played ball a little they’d have holograms of themselves projected against Holyrood in 40 years time lamenting one of the great lost Glasgow groups. But that’s not Gichard. This duo just find stuff funny, look for the joke in the tragedy, like the perennial naked psychedelic romancer in HR, the eponymous hologram of Posthumous Hologram singing “Everything I Do, I Do For You” forever, whether being watched or not.

Gichard walk a thin line between surrealist satire and what could be real human emotions, a tension and awkwardness that actually kind of make the band pretty special. In Your Private Hell, already a global radio smash, our narrator witnesses their beloved commit a murder, maybe, and sticks by them anyway, sharing the carbolic soap they have in bulk, possibly purloined from a Lanarkshire school in the 90s. On Break Up With Johnny Dogbirth, a cul-de-sac of a life is lamented at the funeral of someone you probably shouldn’t have married. Is Dogbirth a real name? Maybe not, but it somehow makes sense. 

The lyrics are just sparkling, perfect nuggets of every day life, if your life was that of an extra-terrestrial trying to make sense of Central Scotland. “Your’re nothing like him,” I said, and flicked some liquid soap in his eyes. If I miss the opening lecture on Increased Sow Longevity, I’ll kill myself.” What can it all mean? The meanings are there, tangled in the thickets, but really it’s a sense thing.. It makes sense in the flesh.

Gichard, let us into your Private Hell?