Girls' album Album
by Steve Haruch
2009 was a good year for girls. Or at least the word "girls" got a lot of play. Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion topped all sorts of year-end album lists, in no small part due to the gurgling electronic sparkle of its hit "My Girls." Then there was the San Francisco band Girls, who supplanted Women as indie rock's most prominent band with a female moniker but no females. Meanwhile, Girls' album Album rode a 9.1 Pitchfork rating all the way to what passes for fame in that curious space where everyone is either a clueless hipster asshole or a clueless reactionary dumbass, and all bands are either totally worthless or totally rule — you know: the Internet. The music obsessives of the blog-comment underworld — though it's unclear sometimes if it's really music they're obsessed with — exchanged many more insults and ironic exclamation points than the band and its melodramatic strum-pop really merit.
So what's the BFD? Girls' languid, vaguely folky ditties are nice enough. At times they lean too heavily on a precious faux-naif that, at its worst, rings incredibly hollow: "I'm all alone with my deep thoughts / I'm all alone with my heartache / And my good intentions." The melodies are often sung in a tone (or lack thereof) that swoops from Morrissey-esque, karaoke-night hamminess to that range where boredom and utter solipsism become nearly indistinguishable from each other. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
In addition to being one of 2009's most needlessly celebrated/vilified bands, Girls were also a part (with Matt and Kim and others) of another of the year's odd trends: the rise of the NSFW indie-rock video. As indie rock has atomized from its post-punk trappings to the laptop-gazing nebulae of glo-fi/chillwave/whatever — where life's struggles mostly involve not wanting to "seem like [you] care about material things" — one way to come across as edgy (or at the very least flip) is to disrobe. Search engine-savvy music bloggers rejoiced in the page views generated by Girls' nudity-laden video for "Lust for Life," which features semi-clothed grinning, bathtub giggles and a man handling an erect penis in a manner not unlike a school kid playing with a sparkler. All the while, the song jangles along pleasantly, scanning the spectrum of human emotions from "I wish I had a boyfriend" to "I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine."
And then there's the back story: Singer Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God cult, where he was forbidden to listen to outside music (though apparently music on movie soundtracks was somehow exempt from this ban, allowing him to hear Queen). As a built-in explanation for the band's almost childlike stabs at sounding deep, it works pretty well, while as a replacement for songwriting it does not. But there's no use begrudging Girls their fun, if that's just what they want, and Album is neither as good nor as bad as your nearest blog flame war might have you believe. More than anything, it's hard to figure what got everyone so worked up in the first place.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
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