Girls, Leeds Cockpit

Girls

October 15th 2009

Tonight’s opening act Swanton Bombs are a highly impressive two piece who, in an alternate reality, would be enjoying the success of fun-but-essentially-talentless acts like Wavves. The room may have been pretty desolate so early in the evening, but the Bombs remained engaging with the perfect blend of ferocious drums, impressively proficient guitar chops and big vocal hooks. Song structures were interesting and the two band members had enough technical musical ability to enable themselves to rock out harder than lots of bands with fuller instrumentation. The riffs and beats pounded hard right up until the final song (presumably entitled ‘Get Your Tanks Off My Lawn’) which took an impressive and welcome slide to the almost soulful allowing the band to flex its impressive musical muscle a little more.

Luckily for Girls, the place filled out a lot more before they hit the stage and a crowd of fans swarmed around the stage as they opened the set with the first, punchy chords of ‘Laura’. One of the shakier aspects of the band’s debut album was the occasional appearance of trite, blog-entry type lyrics with this particular track being a prime offender. However, when you see Owens right there in front of you – singing it like he means it – lines like “you’ve been a bitch, I’ve been an ass” become a lot less rubbish. Indeed, when it comes to lyrics, most live or die on the singer’s strength of the conviction and it’s Owens’ sincere delivery which allow Girls to use choruses like “lay in the park/smoke in the dark/summertime – soak up the sunshine with you” and have them seem endearing and nostalgic rather than naff.

Indeed, Girls could be said to be a band of simple pleasures because just as the lyrics are so twee, plain and direct, so are their hooks. Almost all the hooks, chord progressions and choruses on offer feel like they’ve been swiped straight from that vast bank of popular culture – all massively familiar but impossible to precisely pin down and, hence, are hugely effective. On the occasions, however, when you identify where Girls have unwittingly lifted a particular hook (for example: Status Quo; Brian Wilson; a song from earlier in their own set) then you get a glimpse at the man behind the curtain, the magic is lost and the emperor is left with no clothes.  By and large, however, Girls do a stunning job of riding that gorgeous wave of creating vocal melodies which are instantly familiar but simultaneously completely fresh (kudos also go to the drummer and second guitarist for brilliantly recreating the album’s intricate three part harmony sections).

Album (the band’s imaginatively titled debut album) spends its running time careering wildly between different production values, musical aesthetics and instrumentations. As a live entity, however, Girls have a much more concise and focussed musical identity where the only diversity of texture is the on-or-off of an overdrive pedal. This works in the band’s favour, as it allows the songs’ primary focus to be the songs themselves rather than the production gimmicks of their album counterparts. Essentially, then, what Girls achieved was quite a rare thing: an hour of very solid, mid-tempo guitar based rock songs invoking the nostalgic and familiar whilst remaining exciting and engaging. My recommendation would be to see them soon –  throughout the set, Owens was taking hefty swigs of what I first thought was red wine but turned out to be a bottle of Jameson. How he managed to stay lucid enough to play guitar is anyone’s guess; how much longer he can stay lucid in the long run is just as open to speculation. I’m interested (and slightly concerned) to think about whether or not Owen’s drowning in a sea of booze will result in an even better sophomore album, or no album at all.

No related posts.