Girls

Wed 8th Dec, 2010 in Features

One of the hottest buzz bands of 2009, Girls, is finally set to bring the sun soaked psychedelia of their album, er Album, to Australia for Victoria’s Meredith music festival and three headline shows.

Band leader Christopher Owens told FasterLouder last year that “I can see a big trend in pop melodies coming though. It’s pretty refreshing; it’s music that people like and it’s different to a few years ago when people were playing more noisy stuff or less pop-oriented music. I think it’s cool. Pop music has always been around but there’s a trend of DIY pop music popping up and it’s interesting to see what people do at home.”

Ahead of the band’s debut Australian tour his bandmate JR White gave us his take on the album, touring and why he got laid more often before he joined the group.

Your debut was very varied in terms of its sound, is that due to you guys still trying to find your own sound or was it more of a deliberate thing?
We wanted to make something that’s different song to song, I went to a school for recorded music and I remember one of the main professors saying an album has to be a cohesive piece of work in that you should think about the way that all the songs fit together and there should be a theme throughout, and I always thought that was silly. I’ve always thought that an album should sound different from song to song, I’ve thought it was more interesting that way. I don’t like the way a lot of modern music basically has one sound all the way through it, and I wanna subscribe to the idea that we can play whatever we want, when we feel like it.

Is that why you called it Album, because of the irony that it’s not as cohesive as most albums typically are?
No, not really. I mean to us it’s cohesive, to us the glue is us, you know, the fact that we made it is the thing that holds it together, and everything we do still does sound like us. We called it Album because honestly we were fighting over the name so much and then Chris had some artwork for it, and had put the word ‘Album’ where the title of the album was going to be, and I just said, “I think that’s kinda cool”, and we had on planned on using the photos of our friends for the booklet so that part was like a photo album. It was very Warholian, just to call it like it was and be non-specific about it.

The album was very well received, is there much pressure to do a decent follow up?
No, I wish. We’d just been playing that fucking record for two years, and it definitely took its toll on us. We’d been playing those songs before the record even came out, in San Fransisco, New York and a couple of other places, for a good six months before the first record.

Speaking of the new album, how’s it going?
We’ve got a six song EP coming out next month, and we’re still scheduling studio time for the next record, so pre-production is about to start.

How’s the new stuff sounding in terms of is it similar to the first album, or a new direction?
It’s a bit all over the place, each song will be it’s own thing. We’re never really afraid to do a song, if it sounds like a Hawaiian song or a Latin song, we’ll take it there. It’s going to sound a little more cohesive than the first one, Chris has grown as a songwriter and I’ve grown as an engineer so we’re more confident in our musicianship, we’re getting better. It’s hard to answer that though until we’re creating, I’ll let people decide when they hear it. It should be out between eight and twelve months depending on how the recording goes.