Valium. Morphine. OxyContin. Fentanyl. Ketamine. MDMA. Methadone. Pot. Cocaine. This kind of drug name-dropping by members of local indie-rock outfit Girls, and by the writers profiling them in the recent wave of international press dedicated to the band, makes the resulting articles feel like transcriptions of Intervention episodes. It's enough to make one wonder whether the eventual record-release show— for likely the biggest San Francisco act that still hasn't released an album — is going to end up taking place at St. Helena Hospital.
Sandy Kim
Boys who like Girls: Chet "JR" White and Christopher Owens.
Details
Girls perform with Cass McCombs and the Papercuts on Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 9 p.m., $14-$16; 885-0750 or
www.gamh.com.
Great American Music Hall
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Not everyone is stoked by the debaucherous image being projected to media outlets like the U.K.'s Guardian and The Fader. "It's like, 'Shut your mouth, Chris,'" says lo-fi L.A. pop artist Ariel Pink, who used to play with Girls frontman Christopher Owens in Matt Fishbeck's Holy Shit project. "He doesn't realize that it's going to bite him in the butt. He's just starting out right now, and everybody's going to start writing their stories based on the press that they've read."
Pink is right. That's why a groggy-sounding voicemail greeting and an even groggier Owens calling back a few minutes later the morning of our interview conjures up images of decadently reckless behavior. It's also why it's surprising to be met by a seemingly clear-headed Owens at the door of the Bernal Heights apartment he shares with fellow Girl Chet "JR" White. Instead of waiting upstairs with a few lines of coke to get this party started right, White offers to buy a round of joe at the corner coffeehouse.
"I always thought it was really cool to be an honest band and talk about things like [drugs], but now when it just keeps coming up — there's just too much sensationalism," White says. "It's not really that important anymore. We were doing drugs when we made the record; it was experimentation."
That said, neither White nor Owens — the core members of Girls, who have been fleshed out live with drummer Garret Godard and guitarist John Anderson, who originally sent the band a fan letter — overromanticizes the role that substances have played in their music. They admit that there were points during the recording process where, instead of fostering grand artistic achievements, indulgences led to embarrassing performances and accidentally recording over hours of tracks they'd just completed.
"I have no shame in taking drugs," Owens clarifies. "I think that three-fourths of people try drugs, and talking about it takes some of the stigma away from that. I'm conscious of what is dangerous and what is not, and I don't have a death wish."
Girls' list of narcotic muses isn't the only thing earning the group attention. It has gained the ears of fans, writers, and labels through its music, a beautiful collection of timeless pop songs that draw on old-timey rock (Owens is wearing an Elvis shirt sans irony during the interview), shoegaze, Phil Spector's wall of sound, and the Jesus and Mary Chain's take on that wall of sound.
It's an aesthetic White and Owens have been cultivating since the latter had his heart broken by Liza Thorn (So So Many White White Tigers, Bridez). Thorn helped bring White and Owens together, but she also split up the Curls project she'd been working on with her now-ex, who wrote the music while she penned lyrics and sang.
"When she quit the band and she broke up with me, it was like being thrown out of a nest," Owens says. "It was like, 'Well, I guess I could just try to write some words and sing myself,' and it just instantly worked. I would go back and play shows with Ariel and Matt and they'd be like, 'You're a genius, these are great songs.' I was like, 'Well, they like it, and these are my idols.'"
Pink recalls that the songs were "completely hashed out and they sounded amazingly inspired." "It sounded like an instant hit to me," he adds, "and I knew as long as he continued to believe in himself, it would go somewhere."
Before ending up on True Panther Sounds, which has since become an imprint of indie powerhouse Matador, Girls' full-length debut, Album, took about a year and a half to make. The record, which is out Sept. 15 in San Francisco and a week later in the rest of the country, had Owens writing, White producing, and the duo making the most of its Turk Street practice space and bedrooms in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Bouncing from spastically playful ("Big Bad Mean Motherfucker") to epic and dreamy ("Hellhole Ratrace"), Album remains cohesive thanks to its gorgeous lo-fi haze. It's a sound that makes all of the morphine talk seem relevant: They really were taking drugs to make music to take drugs to. It also finds Owens painting an honest portrait about being hopeful in a hopeless world, and along the way he isn't afraid to name names. "Even the songs that I write about my ex-girlfriend or these songs which have a girl's name, I think they're all about myself," he explains.
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