(Damaged Halo Records, digital)
Montréal-based singer-songwriter Joshua Marc Seguin started his indie-rock project Booster Fawn in 2016, following a career as a professional snowskater. With a dreamy, ’90s-leaning indie sound somewhere between the Stone Roses and Built to Spill, Booster Fawn also possesses tantalizing hints of psychedelic and folk. It’s a heady sonic brew, best captured on the 2023 album Dreams Made of Snowflakes.
Detailing Seguin’s drive to get sober, the record features anthemic rockers such as “Dear Sun, It’s Been So Long” and the surf-rock-influenced title track, on which Seguin promises, “Oh, mama, I’m fine / Just need a little more time, to figure this out.” The album is a powerful, often joyous blast of indie rock, sung entirely in English.
On Tuesday, Seguin offered his Francophile fans an early Valentine’s Day present, Pour maman, for which he rerecorded three tracks from the original album in French.
The language change is charming enough, but the EP also manifests a sonic shift. Seguin and his backing band present the reworked cuts as lo-fi, almost garage-rock raw, in contrast to the slick and powerful production on the full-length. The frenetic rock freak-out of “Nothing Will Make This Easier” still has power to spare, but “Y’en aura pas d’facile” feels just a little more DIY, reminiscent of the Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim, a collection of demos turned into a killer debut rock album. And hey, maybe it’s just English-speaker bias at work, but to me, “À quoi ça sert?” feels more esoteric than the translation “What’s the Point?”
The EP is available at boosterfawn.bandcamp.com.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2024.
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