Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 28/09/09
Label: True Panther

The trouble with settling down to listen to the Girls album is that you know you're going to encounter "Hellhole Ratface" halfway through. For anyone who's dreamed of hearing Elvis Costello emote through the greatest hits of Glasvegas, this is probably a joyful prospect - Girls frontman Christopher Owens lays into the song as if he's been knocked to his knees, squeezing every last drop of emotion from the melody with the certainty that this is it, this is his band's crowning moment.

It's a powerful song, with a powerful reach. And if you don't like it, boy does it ruin the album. Up until that point, the annoyingly titled "Album" feels intriguing, exciting even, the San Franciscan quartet seemingly taking '60s sunshine pop and mangling it with lo-fi values. Opener "Lust For Life" sounds like Bright Eyes finally finished a handclapping pop classic, threw a party to celebrate and got so drunk that Conor Oberst collapsed on the mixing desk, knocking all the faders out and totally messing up the day's work, and they just left it like that, all wrong but all right.

After that, the songs sound like they're on the edge of dissolving in a similar fashion, even though they're not really. "Laura" is dreamy, reverb-heavy, like Saturday Looks Good To Me brought back from the dead for one last eulogy. "God Damned" is scrappy and strung out, like they either nail this 4am take or split up on the spot. "Big Bag" is awful really, a pastiche of the Jesus & Mary Chain covering "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker", but because you think it's part of this magnificent, lo-fi pop experiment, you let it go. It's all part of the grand design, man.

But then "Hellhole Ratface". So blatant, so Glasvegas (never a good thing), so unlovable, and so clearly the band's future. Suddenly what should be charming - the vocal on "Headache" being just a touch slower than the music - feels affected, irritating. "Summertime" is better, expansive, seemingly full of the love it's trying to chart, but because it features that voice, the one from that song, it never quite gets there. It's incredible really - a band that manages to jump the shark during their debut album, by creating what probably feels to them like their unbeatable moment.

It doesn't make sense, to fall out of love with a band because of a single song. But what potentially made "Album" exciting was that it seemed to understand that pop itself doesn't make sense, and that it can still work just as well with all the wrong notes in all the wrong order. When they cleaned up their act, they cleaned up their act.

    by Ian Watson