The most immediate song on Basht.’s debut is about what happens when the news becomes background noise. Terror TV runs on a hypnotic guitar figure that recalls Parquet Courts, a bassline that keeps everything moving, and a solo with a satisfyingly nasty edge. Its lyrics describe watching conflict play out on a screen until being informed starts to look a lot like being numb. You’re nodding along before you’ve registered what’s being said, and that’s the point. Poor Advice works this way at its best: songs that are easy to spend time with, about things most of us would rather not think about.
The Dublin four-piece’s first album, released October 9 on LAB Records, takes its name from the guidance handed down while growing up. Singer and guitarist Jack Leavey points to school, the church, the government and friends, voices you absorb before you’re old enough to question them. Over ten tracks, the album traces how that authority moved from church and state in Ireland to boardrooms and the business of war. It’s a big frame for a debut, and the band built it quickly. The lineup of Leavey, bassist Louis Christle, guitarist Lughaidh Armstrong-Mayock and drummer Ryan McClelland only settled last year, and the songs were written and recorded over about six months of touring, with the band flying to Ali Chant’s Bristol studio during weeks off.
Chant, whose credits include Dry Cleaning, PJ Harvey and The Murder Capital, gave them more than guitars to work with. Leavey has mentioned sitar, synths, sequencers, electronic drums and samples on the record. The core is still grunge weight and gothic atmosphere, in a line running from the Irish acts Leavey grew up on, such as Whipping Boy and Sinéad O’Connor, to Fontaines D.C., Gilla Band and Gurriers. But the album has more space and shading than its subject suggests. Not every song needed the extra layers. Armstrong-Mayock told Dork that Terror TV began as “the most down-the-middle punk-rock song” the band had, and the finished version keeps that directness.
Keira Knightley shows what Basht. can do by holding back. Leavey sings the verses almost in a whisper over a heavy bassline and restless, jagged guitars, before the chorus breaks wide open. The song is about someone trying desperately to save a relationship, and the quiet-loud shape suits it. The hushed sections carry enough tension that they never feel like a wait for the payoff. It was written in a rented house in northern France during a break on a European tour with Miles Kane. Its title comes from a lyric built on a Love Actually image that Leavey later realized he’d misremembered: Keira Knightley isn’t the one ringing the doorbell. That small misfire makes the song more human, not less.
Kids Vs Guns, second to last, is the most direct song on the record. It addresses the suffering of Palestinian children, building slowly through mournful guitars and forceful drums, with violins deepening the grief before the final chorus releases it. There’s no metaphor to decode, and there shouldn’t be. After an album about authority handed down from above, this is where the cost lands: on the people with the least say.
The quiet-to-loud build is Basht.’s most reliable tool, and it isn’t always used as carefully as on Keira Knightley. In places the crescendo arrives because the structure calls for it, not because the song has earned it, and the atmosphere the band clearly want to explore gets cut short. The electronics Leavey describes point toward a way past that. For a debut made this fast, it’s a fair trade, and a reason to be curious about the next record.
Poor Advice is one of my favourite albums of the year because the songs hold up without the concept explaining them. The ideas give the record its shape; the playing and the writing are why I keep going back.
Basht. play Quai des Brumes with Museums on 19 November as part of M for Montreal.
