Golden Grrrls – Golden Grrrls
There is no good reason why Glasgow’s concrete, steel, knuckles and blood-halting cold should serve as such fertile ground for generous-muse indie pop music. And yet, there you have had it: Trashcan Sinatras, Camera Obscura, and Frightened Rabbit recently; the Pastels, the Vaselines, Orange Juice and Aztec Camera a few years ago.
Post-Motown and post-Southern California, Glasgow is now going on 30+ years of functioning as the planet’s foremost and unlikeliest hive of melody. And it has hatched yet another honey producer. Golden Grrrls are upon us.
Hilarity, charm and all associated wonder arrive without pretense with the first track of this self-titled debut album. Unlike many of the latter day Prime Movers noted above, Grrrls are devotedly lo-fi. Chug-a-lug guitars, call-and-answer boy-girl vocals, and no-frills production all introduce themselves immediately. The grinning wink of “New Pop” sounds like it was recorded in a 1992 laundromat, and it sounds “new” only to the extent that the listener was born sometime within the past four or five years.
This is obviously not all compliment: even the world’s best ferris wheel (read: glorious lo-fi pop music) gets a little same-y after four or five revolutions, and we have revolved through several generations of this type of thing already. And then, at almost exactly the one-minute mark of the track and the album, Golden Grrrls reveal their secret weapon.
They possess a lead guitar which frequently spins gold.
The guitar solo in “New Pop” is a subtle, dear-to-the-heart flourish, something enthusiasts will probably remember for a while and something they will always grin over when they hear it again years down the road. But it isn’t really a “flourish” so much as a masterstroke. It is no feat of dexterity, but its effect is absolutely lovely. Oh, and it is 15 seconds long.
There isn’t a track on Golden Grrrls over three-and-a-half minutes in length, and there is only one track stretching beyond three minutes. The rapid pace of the music here stretches time. We can see the wings of hummingbirds. “New Pop” drops us off at “Past Tense” (track 2) when the ante climbs with another gorgeous element: delicate, cooing girl background vocals. Amid the fuzz and distortion and controlled-spasticity of this music, angels float skyward. And then, again, this time a minute-and-forty-five seconds in, another sublime offering of understated guitar soloing. First album, first two tracks, twice-blessed.
And we’re off. Track 3 “Paul Simon” dials up the tempo (!) and the distortion (!!) and appears to possess no less than three separate vocal parts careening through the murk. The vocal recordings clip all over the place, and some of the bass and percussion parts were clearly intentionally recorded at volume setting 11 so as to sound like fortuitous technical mishaps. By the time the last blitz through the chorus comes around, we are at a point of Lowest Fi/Highest Volume/Greatest Fun: beyond the reach of the nicest speakers or closest listening. One yearns only for a cheap beer, the promise of a post-show cigarette, and a crowded club floor filled with a bunch of bouncing co-conspirators.
There have been other practitioners of this type of thing in the recent and remote past, and one can’t help but locate the legacy within the din. The his-and-hers vocals and ripping pace are not unlike well-named Velocity Girl from the early 1990s, and minus the male singing, a bunch of Golden Grrrls—in particular, the guitar work and the floaty background vocals—resembles Portland’s All Girl Summer Fun Band, who released three albums between 2000 and 2008 and who also demonstrated fleeting-to-absent interest in the concept of a song longer than 180 seconds.
What is different this time around? Why stay on the ride? Glasgow, probably.
Golden Grrrls, for all of its manic cuteness, is both more muscular and more fully realized than albums from the two bands noted above, and the band seems like a better bet to persist and evolve over time. There are, in fact, moments here that reward the nice speakers. While much of the playing is simple, very little of it is thin. The production, when not brimful with crackle and buzz, can be nuanced. If the immediate comparisons are bands like the two noted above, one may owe the parting nod to Glasgow and its glorious pop tradition of complexity disguised by melody.
To wit: the band is also able to slow all of this craziness down and polish it up. A little. “Older Today,” conveniently titled for a track which sounds just a tad more calmed and matured than the others, takes the same multi-vocal approach but eases off the saw blade tempo (just) a bit while also sanding down some of the distortion. What results—gleaming but not overdone, attractive but not contrived, with a nifty little outro, too—is really quite perfect. (Cementing the status of Perfection: a very mumbled and bashful “sha-na-na-na-na-na” at the back end of the chorus, which is actually and reliably impossible to hear or to write about without giggling. Motown. Glasgow.)
The back half of Golden Grrrls is crowded with similarly subtle work. “Time Goes Slow,” “Never Said Enough,” and “We’ve Got” are all a bit closer to order than chaos. “We’ve Got,” in particular, manages to unite a lovely, unrushed guitar line (and vaguely aching, haunting chorus) with some very pretty layered vocals. This is a hell of a closing track: something preposterously close to a memento mori for such a superficially skittish and offhand little pop album.
The approach taken by Golden Grrrls has its blind spots. This is not the album to which to turn for detailed lyrical character sketches, witty turns of phrase, or well-told tales. Even at under 30 total minutes, the album can seem long because of the tendency toward rapid-repeat song elements. Lyrics default to simple phrase repeats so often that four or five songs in a row can be nystagmus-inducing. While the playing and singing both frequently achieve a rare alchemy of subtlety and simplicity, the repetitive lyrics locate neither virtue often enough. The follow up album can improve upon this. Please.
Like a hipster’s outfit: an album surely requires enormous effort to sound spontaneous, chaotic and free without sounding like half-realized lazy crap or contrived simplicity. Skill must surely accompany the effort. While neither skill nor effort evidently made it into the “What shall we name ourselves?” portion of Golden Grrrls’ fledgling career, both have helped to define their debut album. A better ride than you remember, with better guitars, and worth the ticket price.
Keepers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11
April 2013
