“Hellhole Ratrace”
from the album Album
2009
iTunes
Girls, the San Francisco duo of Christopher Owens and J R White, arrives with shoulders shrugged, head slightly down. Its debut album, titled Album, is a lean ramble, in no way ostentatious. Knowingly or not, Mr. Owens has the tender brooding of Buddy Holly down cold, with a touch of Elvis Costello’s shakiness in his voice. But Album isn’t clean: it’s flayed and ragged and hazy. Like so much of the noise and psychedelia lately infesting the indie-rock underground, underneath the slop lies terrific instincts for clean, artful melody. In that vein Album is one of the year’s most bracing pop releases, and one of the best, a devastatingly fresh reframing of the pop songbook. Mr. White lends versatile support on these numbers, which pilfer elementary punk, country-rock, and 1950s-vintage shuffles. (A beautiful instrumental with stirring gospel organs is called “Curls.”) But Mr. Owens is the revelation, with deliciously malleable voice and attitude: desperate on “Ghostmouth,” snide on “Lust for Life,” pleading on “Lauren Marie” and on “Hellhole Ratrace,” just plain old winded. The feelings are complicated but the songs are raw — like templates for others to copy.