Girls - Album

After deserting a Christian cult Girls’ songwriter Christopher Owens spent years working in kitchens and bars. With Chet JR White he sweated it out as a waiter and coffee boy, partying when he had a chance. Eventually they formed a band. They wrote a couple of songs and had a chance to record, setting up in different rehearsal room across San Franscisco.

The result is ‘Album’, twelve songs documenting the sad stories of twelve different California girls. ‘Now I’m never going to fix up and I might be crazy’ warble’s Owens on ‘God Damned’. ‘I wish I had a boyfriend’ he trills on ‘Lust for Life’. Even ‘Big Bag’’s retro celebration is curtailed by ‘Hellhole Ratrace’. The band’s first single strums oh so solemnly for seven minutes. It shows how each self deprecating tale is a look behind the cheery facade of west coast life; much of the record dresses drudgery in pop melody.

While it’s a trick that the likes of Collins, Murdoch and Cocker have been playing for years, Owens proves he’s more than capable of pulling it off. Like those dudes he fills the space between observer and participant, telling his subjects to ‘believe’ at points, acting as miserable narrator at others. On ‘Album’ the female characters are as shit [‘Laura’] as they are gorgeously sun-kissed [‘Summertime’] and their tales as damning as they are beautifully arranged.

As Owens’ estranged father once wrote, ‘Life can get ugly but we don’t have to.’