REVIEW: GIRLS-ALBUM

by Sara Brocklesby.

It's hard to review Album without talking about how referential it is. I started off charting all the various references the songs make to 60s pop and to shoegaze, but in the end this just seems to miss the point. I feel like Miss Michelle from 80s kids show Romper Room, when she looked through a fake mirror and observed, "I see Sarah and Peter, and Christopher…". Well, in the new release from Girls, I heard Pulp (particularly This is Hardcore) and The Make-Up and The Beatles, and Phil Spector and The Church and My Bloody Valentine, and mostly, The Beach Boys.

On one level, the ouija-board conversation Girls are having with past heroes makes for a deeply enjoyable record, postmodernist lyrical exercises aside.

I've been listening to a truckload of The Beatles again after quite a long break, and Album's opener 'Lust for Life' is pretty goddamn funny in this context – it could be John Lennon taking the piss out of himself and the band's 'yeah yeah love you hold my, err, hand' early Hamburg period.

'Big Bad Mean Motherfucker' pops in on the Beach Boys for 'California Girls'. Underlining the record's time-travel, its cheeky beginning is the sound of a tape being rewound. The song gets a wee bit creepy and ends a dark fantasy, California girls beware.

'Ghost Mouth' is a knowing and well-executed pastiche of the Spector wall of sound, lovelorn and kind of eerie. But then a sudden clarion Go-Betweens-esque guitar solo drops in. Girls' sound is, at times, a sort of cousin to our own 80s and 90s homages to the sixties (You Am I, The Church, The Hummingbirds, etc).

I got to thinking about a George Harrison story. As The Beatles were awakened to Indian spiritual philosophies, George decided they all 'needed a mantra'. Though they were keen to lead the counterculture adoption of transcendental meditation, they didn't have a bloody mantra, and where would they get one? Luckily they were famous and found the getting of such things relatively simple, so they conveniently got an appearance with the Maharishi and he promptly supplied them with some. In repeating 60s pop, Girls could be looking for a mantra – if you sing about California girls over and over again, maybe an answer will reveal itself.

There are moments throughout the album where the brightness feels melancholic. 'Lauren Marie' explicitly references The Beach Boys' Smile album, adopting Brian Wilson's style of drug-damaged lament. Like Smile, Album is coloured by a confused yearning to be healed, and uncertainty around whether we can find it on our own.

'Hellhole Ratrace' explicitly manifests a sense of generational comedown. The song strays into Spiritualized territory with its backdrop of keening shoegaze. "I don't wanna cryyyyyy…" comes over as an exhausted plea for relief from existence. It doesn't feel cliched to share in this; to be moved. This feat is the most impressive achievement of Album. The emotional weight of spiritual exhaustion locates it in our present and its condition is familiar. For a first album, Album actually feels like a third release – it's like Girls started off jaded, wrestling with lives lived in bad faith and wholeheartedly under the influence.