Gauche

"....At any rate, I’m back in the crowd, and I’ve found Jill, a kind lady and Popfest veteran that practices karate, who I met earlier today. For the first time this evening, I don’t know what to expect next – I’ve never heard Gauche before, and they fill the stage with half a dozen folk, including a lady with a stonking huge sax. At once they launch into the groove – ooh, that groove! Precarious! Wiry! Witty! Democratic! Shouting! The back of my head logs the Delta 5 / Au Pairs / X-Ray Specs connection; the rest of me propels into motion. I can’t help myself. Neither can Jill. With each new song, with each new groove, with each new revolt, with each new singer, Gauche remove all the barriers that usually petrify me. What fear? What anxiety? What discouraging male gaze? None! Nada! We in the front row jump and jive and mingle, igniting each other into action..." - Lee Adcock - Collapse Board

"All of the demos and tapes that I’ve been spending the most time with lately seem to share the same attention to the twin guiding principles of minimalism and angularity laid down long ago by the post-punk advisory committee (UK DIY division). Gauche are a modern day Washington, DC dream team, with members of Priests, Neonates and Flamers (among others) combining forces in a veritable mind-meld of off-kilter, contorted genius. Multiple female voices overlap in roundabout patterns and repeat certain lines as insistent mini-manifestoes on their Get Away With Gauche cassette, from the haunting chant of “I know I can’t survive like this” in “Pay Day,” which dissects the inequity of our modern systems of labor, to the dual declarations of “don’t build it if it can’t fall” and “we pay the price” that punctuate “High Rise” along with some of the most jagged, staccato guitar this side of vintage Gang of Four, who were similarly skilled at knocking out fiery class war anthems that you could still dance to. Evoking riot grrrl within the context of modern female-dominated musical projects is always sort of a risky (and typically lazy) proposition, but reverberations of the incendiary, primitive spark that was central to so many of the bands historically linked with riot grrrl and its aftershocks (think Huggy Bear or DC’s almighty Slant 6) can definitely be heard in the stripped-down punk tension and impassioned calls-and-responses of “Copper Woman” and “Boom Hazard”. Buy it now or regret it later. (g-a-u-c-h-e.bandcamp.com)..." - Maximum Rocknroll