Girls frontman Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God cult. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn't believe in medical attention. His dad left. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself. As a teenager, Owens fled and lived as a Texas gutter-punk for a while. Then a local millionaire took Owens under his wing, and Owens moved to San Francisco. There, he and Chet "JR" White formed Girls, and recorded Album, their debut album, under the influence of just about every kind of pill they could find.
As band origin stories go, this one is so epically sad and squalid and ultimately triumphant that nobody could make it up. It's the sort of story that can overwhelm a band so completely that you never really hear their music; you only hear the story. So it's a tribute to Album that you don't need to know one word of that first paragraph to hear it as what it is: a dizzily powerful piece of work. That's partly because you don't need to know Owens' story to intuit that there's something going on here. When I saw the band play SXSW, knowing nothing about them beyond their compulsively listenable "Hellhole Ratrace" single, I wrote that the band's music sounds "like the work of one deeply weird and possibly sad person."
That's largely because of Owens' enormously evocative voice, a hiccupy thing that feels like a direct descendant of every sad nerd genius in pop history. The immediate obvious reference point is Elvis Costello, but you can also hear shards of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison and Paul McCartney and Morrissey. Owens never brays or moans or snarls; he sings simple songs about heartbreak with the internalized classicism of someone who's been listening to oldies radio in his sleep his whole life. He's playful; he has fun with it. But there's always a wounded, raggedy quaver at the back of his throat, one that implies worlds of hurt beyond the simple breakup songs he's singing.
And make no mistake; most of the songs on the Girls album are about, well, girls. Owens reportedly wrote much of the album in the aftermath of a bad breakup. There's one song called "Laura" and another called "Lauren Marie", so he's presumably got someone in mind. But he never falls into emo laceration, instead delivering his sentiments with conversational directness: "You've been a bitch, I've been an ass/ I don't wanna point the finger; I just know I don't like this, I don't wanna do this." But even his most innocuous classic-pop lyrics hint at a deep-seated fucked-upedness. On "Goddamn", he gets downright creepy over glimmering acoustic guitars and "Ghost Town" percussion-rattles: "Just give all your attention to me." "Headache" is just as fragile and reverby, and Owens cops a half-joking lounge-singer baritone to sing, "Let's be the people that we want to be/ Let's live like we could never part"-- implying, of course, that he's not already the person he wants to be. And he starts out "Hellhole Ratrace", the band's first single, with this: "I'm sick and tired of the way that I feel." He's a broken man.
Musically, Album is mostly sunny Beach Boys pastiche, but it's not the kajillionth indie attempt at orchestral Pet Sounds majesty. Rather, it's simple and forthright early Beach Boys stuff: compact guitar-jangles, sha-la-la harmonies, muffled heartbeat drums. It sounds great. And even though it has a basic core sound, Album manages to cover a lot of aesthetic ground in its 44 minutes. Without being showy about it, they swing from rushing power-pop to acoustic campfire laments to "Morning Light", which is one of the most fully realized slices of shoegaze revivalism I've heard in years. If they'd made an entire album of songs like "Morning Light", Girls would be getting a ton of blog love, but they decided to go for something at once messier and simpler. And they're getting a ton of blog love anyway.
There's a pillowy quality to many of the sounds on Album, but this isn't lo-fi or glo-fi or whatever. Rather, every little production flourish is so much a part of the whole that you don't notice it until the 10th or 15th listen. On "Lust for Life", for instance, there's a melodica that bubbles up on the second half. "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker" is joyous beach-party stuff, but there's a beautifully discordant guitar solo in there. "Hellhole Ratrace" builds to an epic guitar whoosh halfway through its seven minutes, but the beat's hammer never quite falls; the drums stay just slightly off. The guitars on "Lauren Marie" twang like Duane Eddy's. All this stuff functions like the sleigh bells on Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run": subtle little intuitive details that you might never notice but that add to the devastating whole. The canniness of Album's production choices and the scuzzy depression of the lyrics and the gut-level songwriting instincts, along with everything else about the record, add up to something elusive and fascinating-- maybe even heartbreaking.
