The Etownian >> Campus Life
Girls: Sugar, spice, everything nice?
Thursday November 19 2009
Girls’ front man Christopher Owens was born into the twisted arms of the Children of God cult, an extreme ecclesiastical system infamous for accounts of religious prostitution, child sexual abuse, murder and suicide.
Owens’ older brother died of pneumonia because his mother abided by the cult’s tenet against hospitalization and medical attention. His brother’s death drove his father to abandon the family before Owens’ birth, and his mother was forced into prostitution.
Owens toured Asia and Europe with the evangelistic troupe, never attending school or hearing a note of secular pop music. After receiving his first guitar from an ex-Fleetwood Mac guitarist (and former cult member), Owens escaped the confines of the cult.
Living as a penny-buskin’, guitar-playin’ urchin at the age of 16, Owens saved enough change for a one-way ticket to Texas. While surviving in the gutter, adopting a punk attitude and a prescription drug habit to match, Owens was rescued by a millionaire philanthropist benefactor.
With monetary and emotional support from his only mentor, Owens relocated to the West Coast’s most alternative-lifestyle-and background-accepting city. In San Francisco, he finally began to experience everything he had been denied in the cult: the good things in life.
Like many gimmicks and shticks used in the music industry to sell artists, a good story usually overshadows the music.
With a story of this anecdotal magnitude, Girls’ songs should be eclipsed behind the towering shade of their saga.
However, on their debut, simply titled “Album,” 12 schizophrenic yet captivating songs share the role as the story’s raconteur. Following the counterculture advice coined by 1960s psychedelic drug advocate and Harvard professor Timothy Leary, Girls have already “turned on, tuned in and dropped out” for their premiere.
Despite some heartbreaking lyrical themes, most of “Album” sounds as if it has been filtered through a pair of Polaroid lenses staring at the hazy California sun. Built around spiked guitar progressions, the opener “Lust for Life” is a sarcastic ode to pursuing ambitions that are out of reach. Within his malleable and damaged warble, Owens admits “I wish I had a father / Maybe then I would have turned out right / But now I’m just crazy, I’m totally mad / Yeah I’m just crazy / I’m f****d in the head.”
“Big Bad Mean M**********r” sounds like an early Beach Boys tribute — that is, if Brian Wilson’s hallucinations were stimulated by fentanyl transdermal patches instead of LSD blotter papers. "Headache” finds Owens adopting a different vocal timbre that’s comparable to Morrissey amorously crooning on top of a cocktail lounge’s baby grand.
The record’s centerpiece, “Hellhole Ratrace,” is an epic 7-minute hipster kumbaya full of discordant guitars that build throughout its mantric chorus.
Visually, the song illustrates an Urban Outfitters catalog’s worth of ragamuffin-chic burn-outs and their odyssey toward an agreed upon mecca: a beach bonfire. The other Girl, Chet “JR” White, garnishes both “Summertime” and “Lauren Marie” with rich sonic production that amalgamates the echo chamber-derived “Wall of Sound” and lo-fi technical flaws.
Upon your first hearing of “Album,” you can’t help but assume that you have been listening to a bohemian mix-tape for the past 45 minutes.
Taking cues from rock ’n roll maestros of the last five decades, each song represents a specific influence of the past. From the vulnerable chirp of Buddy Holly and syrupy sneer of Elvis Costello, to the stoned-but-euphoric gospel of Spiritualized, “Album” is a pastiche of 20th century reverberations, reinterpreted and recorded for the 21st (or, perhaps, Girls just want to have fun).
Although they victims of the music journalism pundits of hype, a Girls video will never be a part of “I Love the New Millennium: Part Deux.” No matter how compelling and profitable their story is, a third season of “Tool Academy” is guaranteed to fill their slot. However, that doesn’t mean Girls can’t be your (indie) “Rock of Love.”
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