Girls @ Manning Bar, Sydney(8/12/10)

Wed 15th Dec, 2010 in Gig Reviews

I’m not sure just how to describe it, which is a shame when your task is to do exactly that, but there is something very special about Girls. Like the gender their name pertains to, their music is so mysterious, so elusive, so strange and so exciting. The crowd at the Manning knew this, that’s why they showed up despite being sorely indigent. When we’re too poor to own a wallet we’ll still have this performance to hold onto.

Curtains open to key-player Christopher Owens, front and centre, cooing into a floral adorned microphone. A soft Ghost Mouth intro builds until ‘nothing compares to you’ where Owens kicks back and begins using his Rickenbacker like a gun; it’s a really cool playfulness.

The superfect Laura comes next with its honest, unromanticised take on relationships. Girls really do grab traditional song content only to disregard norms and mould it until desired. Owens does this nifty kick-throw thing with some flowers, plays back-to-back with co-guitarist, all with a cheeky grin plastered on his face. Everyone watches Owens.

By the time God Damned comes around I’ve clued into how much fuller their sound is live compared to their DIY recordings. It’s big and sharp, really showing off their craft. These guys are crazy talented performers. The meticulous attention to detail, the improv fretwork and the unrelenting creativity of the bands nucleus is a real spectacle.

New stuff is just as well received, with both Heartbreaker and Substance prompting sing-alongs. If these tracks are a true indication of where Girls are heading, we’ve got a lot to be excited for. Efficacious addictions that really do ‘help you rock and roll’.

Sometimes songs are just so perfect that you don’t know what to do with yourself. Lust for Life is just so perfect that I don’t know what to do with myself. I really do wish I had a beach house, a pizza and a bottle of wine. They’ve tapped into my desires and all I can do is dance. 2 minutes and 25 seconds of pure, jangley, 60’s pop glory.

Owens holds himself with such aplomb that his coolness could come across as disconnected. In fact the whole band seems surprisingly farouche and distant, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it was out of a keen focus, despite how casual they looked. At one stage Owens pulled a face while strumming a progression in Darling as if he was hearing it for the first time.

A killer set closer of Hellhole Ratrace and Morning Light highlights the quality of the songs Girls create. Broken songs for broken people. Tristful, disconsolate time-bombs wrapped up in a bow. Little packages of heartbreak, anxiety and youth. Knowing Owens’ history, we feel it all twice as hard. Also, the diversity in genre-spanning talent they hold is made blatantly obvious when you see them perform these songs side by side tracks like Solitude or Laura.

Girls remerged on stage for possibly the most bizarre encore I’ve ever experienced. With the crowd yelling out requests, bassist JR White jested that they couldn’t play every song they had. Owens looked around in a confused, frustrated state at his fellow band mates before instigating Lauren Marie followed by an ode to their hometown, Life in San Francisco. Owens asked his band mates if that was it, if they had time for one more but White firmly insisted that it was over, and they left. Grateful and satisfied, the greedy crowd did the same.