Breaking: Girls

September 9th, 2009 by Rolling Stone Leave a reply »

Who: San Francisco’s Girls are led by Christopher Owens, who was raised in more than a dozen countries as a member of the Children of God cult before escaping at age 16, moving back to the States and taking a job as a supermarket stocker in Texas. He hitchhiked to New York and eventually decided to become a painter in California, where he met Holy Shit’s Matt Fishbeck and Ariel Pink, fell in love with their sound and joined the band. He had learned to play guitar as a teen in Denmark — he busked on the streets playing Everly Brothers tunes — and began writing his own songs at age 27. Bassist-producer “JR” White cultivated Owens’ Beach Boys and Phil Spector influences on the band’s debut, Album, out later this month.

Sounds Like: Owens is a vocal dead ringer for Elvis Costello on Album, which is packed with surfy, ’50s-tinged psych-pop. “Big Bad Mean Motherfucker” recalls Chuck Berry put through a Sister Ray-era Velvet Underground filter, and “Hellhole Ratrace” is a giant, strummy acoustic stoner epic that approaches the seven-minute mark.

Vital Stats:

• Country-hopping with his mom, Owens didn’t have the most traditional childhood to put it mildly. “Growing up I wasn’t allowed to listen to radio or watch TV or read books,” he says. “I was like brought up inside of a commune, we wouldn’t even really go out that much. But I remember the first time I discovered Michael Jackson and it was crazy intense for me. My mom was like, ‘That guy is the devil himself, he’s the most evil’ and I was really skeptical of what my mom believed so I thought like, ‘That can’t be true’ and I became obsessed with Michael Jackson.”

• Album was recorded “in the rehearsal studio aft...

Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily

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