Girls
Real Estate (Acoustic), King Krule
Sat, January 14, 2012
Doors: 7:00 pm / Show: 8:00 pm
Terminal 5
New York, NY
$25
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This event is all ages
http://www.terminal5nyc.com/event/72213/
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Girls
It’s rare to find something as true and beautiful as the band Girls. Listening to their music, it’s as though Christopher Owens and JR White were meant to find each other, sincere rock and roll soul mates in the age of irony. And while that might sound like fancy, it’s closer to the truth than you think.
“If you’re going to San Francisco…”
Just as the Velvets crackled with New York City electricity and Smiths’ songs came soaked in Manchester drizzle, so the music of Girls captures the stoned and sun-brushed outlook of life in San Francisco. Taking the classic California pop template perfected by Brian Wilson and applying a woozy, narcotic makeover, Girls make music that sincerely glorifies adolescence - a youth of hopeful confusion and love strong enough to hurt you. You’ll detect 50’s surf-pop, 60’s psychedelia and 80’s shoe-gaze at play here – the West Coast-by-way-of-somewhere-else; but ultimately San Francisco washes over this music.
“We’re all looking for love and meaning in our lives.”
Desire and heartbreak are themes that blanket Girls’ album, from fruitless longing (“I might never get my arms around you/But that doesn’t mean that I won’t try” – “Lauren Marie”) to painful reflection (“Maybe if I really try with all of my heart/Then I could make a brand new start in love with you” – “Lust for Life”).
Christopher’s lyrics shoot straight for your heart, as they come directly from his. As he himself notes: “Sometimes the best way is to have simple lyrics. There’s this country song by Tim McGraw where he sings: ‘We’re all looking for love and meaning in our lives.’ To me, that speaks volumes, even though it’s so simple.”
“All I have to do is dream”
It is difficult to talk about the music of Girls without addressing Christopher’s unique background. Born into the Children of God cult, he spent his childhood travelling the globe, attending prayer sessions and busking in the street, all the while shielded from the outside world. In his words, “they thought they could hide us from a whole lot of stuff and teach us to be happy, perfect children of god. But you can’t control people like that.”
The full story of Christopher’s time in the cult, which includes tales of suicide, prostitution and an eventual escape to Texas, is one for another time. What is clear is that this is far more than just a neat back-story – life in the Children of God had a massive impact on Christopher's songwriting. It was there that he learned to perform, and was exposed to a surprisingly diverse array of sound – much of it original music composed within the community, but also a variety of “sanctioned” popular music, most notably the Everly Brothers and the Fleetwoods. Later, rebellious older teens exposed him to Guns ‘n Roses and Michael Jackson, as well.
“The whole cult was really based around music,” notes Christopher, admitting that he saw a beauty in a lot of the songs they would sing together. “In fact, a lot of Girls' music has a sound that’s very much like the Children Of God music. There’s a spiritual kind of quality. Even though I’m not at all religious and very much against the whole experience, it's there. Brian Wilson talks about the spiritual thing that music is. I don’t know what that is exactly, but I know that if I just close my eyes then music takes me somewhere else.”
At 16 Christopher left Children of God and wound a circuitous route through the Amarillo, Texas’ punk scene before eventually finding a natural home in San Francisco. There he fell into the local music community, playing gigs with Ariel Pink and his Holy Shit project: “I wouldn’t have got into writing music at all if I hadn’t played with Holy Shit – watching them play was like a lightbulb going off.” In San Francisco, Christopher also met JR, a chef and amateur music producer, with whom he started Girls.
“Nothing compares to u”
Quickly after meeting one another, Christopher and JR began to spend all their time together, eventually sharing an apartment and even knocking down a wall that divided their rooms. As Christopher's openhearted songs began to take shape, JR was on hand to arrange the perfect musical backdrop.
“I have these visions of grandeur, where I want to hire string sections and timpani, and really go for it like in the 60s,” grins JR. “But we were doing it in our bedrooms. We mainly recorded onto reel-to-reel tape, and also on an old computer that shut down on us in the middle of the session. All sorts of variables made the recordings sound like they do.”
Album is a song-cycle about the various characters and desires that color Christopher and JR’s lives. Each song tells a story, some heartbreaking and some hopeful, some mischievous and others plaintive, but always, always true. Described by the band as "honest, loose, ethereal, obnoxious and perfect," it is a sincere tribute to the majesty of great pop music and the redemptive powers of rock ‘n roll.
Girls’ debut album ‘Album’ is released on 22nd September 2009 on True Panther Sounds
“If you’re going to San Francisco…”
Just as the Velvets crackled with New York City electricity and Smiths’ songs came soaked in Manchester drizzle, so the music of Girls captures the stoned and sun-brushed outlook of life in San Francisco. Taking the classic California pop template perfected by Brian Wilson and applying a woozy, narcotic makeover, Girls make music that sincerely glorifies adolescence - a youth of hopeful confusion and love strong enough to hurt you. You’ll detect 50’s surf-pop, 60’s psychedelia and 80’s shoe-gaze at play here – the West Coast-by-way-of-somewhere-else; but ultimately San Francisco washes over this music.
“We’re all looking for love and meaning in our lives.”
Desire and heartbreak are themes that blanket Girls’ album, from fruitless longing (“I might never get my arms around you/But that doesn’t mean that I won’t try” – “Lauren Marie”) to painful reflection (“Maybe if I really try with all of my heart/Then I could make a brand new start in love with you” – “Lust for Life”).
Christopher’s lyrics shoot straight for your heart, as they come directly from his. As he himself notes: “Sometimes the best way is to have simple lyrics. There’s this country song by Tim McGraw where he sings: ‘We’re all looking for love and meaning in our lives.’ To me, that speaks volumes, even though it’s so simple.”
“All I have to do is dream”
It is difficult to talk about the music of Girls without addressing Christopher’s unique background. Born into the Children of God cult, he spent his childhood travelling the globe, attending prayer sessions and busking in the street, all the while shielded from the outside world. In his words, “they thought they could hide us from a whole lot of stuff and teach us to be happy, perfect children of god. But you can’t control people like that.”
The full story of Christopher’s time in the cult, which includes tales of suicide, prostitution and an eventual escape to Texas, is one for another time. What is clear is that this is far more than just a neat back-story – life in the Children of God had a massive impact on Christopher's songwriting. It was there that he learned to perform, and was exposed to a surprisingly diverse array of sound – much of it original music composed within the community, but also a variety of “sanctioned” popular music, most notably the Everly Brothers and the Fleetwoods. Later, rebellious older teens exposed him to Guns ‘n Roses and Michael Jackson, as well.
“The whole cult was really based around music,” notes Christopher, admitting that he saw a beauty in a lot of the songs they would sing together. “In fact, a lot of Girls' music has a sound that’s very much like the Children Of God music. There’s a spiritual kind of quality. Even though I’m not at all religious and very much against the whole experience, it's there. Brian Wilson talks about the spiritual thing that music is. I don’t know what that is exactly, but I know that if I just close my eyes then music takes me somewhere else.”
At 16 Christopher left Children of God and wound a circuitous route through the Amarillo, Texas’ punk scene before eventually finding a natural home in San Francisco. There he fell into the local music community, playing gigs with Ariel Pink and his Holy Shit project: “I wouldn’t have got into writing music at all if I hadn’t played with Holy Shit – watching them play was like a lightbulb going off.” In San Francisco, Christopher also met JR, a chef and amateur music producer, with whom he started Girls.
“Nothing compares to u”
Quickly after meeting one another, Christopher and JR began to spend all their time together, eventually sharing an apartment and even knocking down a wall that divided their rooms. As Christopher's openhearted songs began to take shape, JR was on hand to arrange the perfect musical backdrop.
“I have these visions of grandeur, where I want to hire string sections and timpani, and really go for it like in the 60s,” grins JR. “But we were doing it in our bedrooms. We mainly recorded onto reel-to-reel tape, and also on an old computer that shut down on us in the middle of the session. All sorts of variables made the recordings sound like they do.”
Album is a song-cycle about the various characters and desires that color Christopher and JR’s lives. Each song tells a story, some heartbreaking and some hopeful, some mischievous and others plaintive, but always, always true. Described by the band as "honest, loose, ethereal, obnoxious and perfect," it is a sincere tribute to the majesty of great pop music and the redemptive powers of rock ‘n roll.
Girls’ debut album ‘Album’ is released on 22nd September 2009 on True Panther Sounds
Real Estate (Acoustic)
On October 18th 2011, New Jersey’s Real Estate released Days, their second album and first for Domino. A coming of age moment for childhood friends Martin Courtney (Guitar and Vocals), Matt Mondanile (Guitar) and Alex Bleeker (Bass), Days was recorded over the course of five patient months in a remote New Paltz, NY barn-cum-studio with the help of Kevin McMahon (Titus Andronicus, The Walkmen.) A gorgeous suite of guitar-pop songs, Days is a testament to the fact that the sonic formula Real Estate developed and shared with their debut album (Real Estate, Woodsist 2009) heralded the arrival of a new, genuine and enduring group of voices in American independent music. Days sees the band tighten and refine their brand of timeless, melodic and genuine music- consolidating the breezy sketches of their earlier work into considered, graceful pop songs.
In the summer of 2008, high school friends Martin, Matt and Alex graduated from their respective colleges and returned to Ridgewood – the New Jersey suburb in which they had all grown up, first learned to play music and shared countless hours of stoned, aimless drives through together. Finding themselves living back with their families, revisiting old haunts and re-navigating the beautiful beaches and forests they had grown up with, they were equally inspired and confused by the powerful memories such places held. This sense of disorientation led to a natural creative spark that inevitably pulled them back to each other. As Martin himself puts it, “it wasn’t even something worth talking about…it was always obvious we were going to play together again.” The resultant eponymous debut album, (Woodsist, 2009) wove together their relived youthful summers and charmed thousands with its warm, heartfelt songs born of a truly natural, organic understanding and friendship.
The band spent the two years since the release of their debut touring around the world, working out the album's songs live, improvising their structures and allowing them to breathe enough to reach their most natural and refined end. Days, months and eventually years went by, seasons changed, and with that change Real Estate came of age. While Real Estate devoted itself to the golden haze of summer, Days, is a distinctly more evergreen and autumnal suite of songs.
The songs are built around deceptively simple, cyclical riffs; caressed and performed with a rhythm and restraint that is atypical for a band Real Estate's age. The instruments swim together, anchored down by Bleeker's firm Lesh-esque bass, ebbing and flowing, occasionally enriched with flourishes of country piano, soft synths and slide guitar. Several songs, like the album's rousing first single "It's Real" were written by Courtney in the way he wrote some of his first songs, laying out their architecture first on a bass rather than a guitar, allowing him to evolve the song's basic melody. Others, like "Green Aisles" and the Bleeker-fronted "Wonder Years" formed out of extended jams, providing them a fluid structure that only a band of craftsmen could make sound so effortless and guided. Courtney has also matured as a lyricist, adeptly capturing and singing youth's most potent crystalline moments with a surgeon's precision. He wrote most of the songs on Days early in the morning, immediately upon waking up, when the unscripted promise of a new day was still in its purest form. In "Green Aisles" he sings "all those aimless drives through green aisles / our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise". Such a sentiment is an almost perfect lens through which to view Days, the coming of age album they've made. Days is greater than the sum of its parts, as defined by its ebullient moments as it is by its moments of restraint. Lyrically and melodically part of what makes Real Estate’s music so vital are the moments where the disarmingly simple is made unexpectedly profound.
New Jersey is the central character of this record - its placid, boring microcities/municipalities juxtaposed with the often-overlooked majesty of its forests and oceans. Courtney, Bleeker and Mondanile don't view this place with the oft-repeated disdain and criticism associated with one of America’s less cool states, but with a bemused sense of wonder and appreciation. It’s where they’re from, what fostered them – and, for better or worse – what has shaped them. Unlike many artists who deny their origins preferring to cultivate an aura of urban hardness and experience at the cost of genuine reflections, Real Estate sing about exactly where they come from.
To quote “Green Aisles” again, for Martin “all that wasted time,” is maybe “not so unwise” because the careless sensations of youth that seem trivial in the adult world are actually something that endure and influence us long
In the summer of 2008, high school friends Martin, Matt and Alex graduated from their respective colleges and returned to Ridgewood – the New Jersey suburb in which they had all grown up, first learned to play music and shared countless hours of stoned, aimless drives through together. Finding themselves living back with their families, revisiting old haunts and re-navigating the beautiful beaches and forests they had grown up with, they were equally inspired and confused by the powerful memories such places held. This sense of disorientation led to a natural creative spark that inevitably pulled them back to each other. As Martin himself puts it, “it wasn’t even something worth talking about…it was always obvious we were going to play together again.” The resultant eponymous debut album, (Woodsist, 2009) wove together their relived youthful summers and charmed thousands with its warm, heartfelt songs born of a truly natural, organic understanding and friendship.
The band spent the two years since the release of their debut touring around the world, working out the album's songs live, improvising their structures and allowing them to breathe enough to reach their most natural and refined end. Days, months and eventually years went by, seasons changed, and with that change Real Estate came of age. While Real Estate devoted itself to the golden haze of summer, Days, is a distinctly more evergreen and autumnal suite of songs.
The songs are built around deceptively simple, cyclical riffs; caressed and performed with a rhythm and restraint that is atypical for a band Real Estate's age. The instruments swim together, anchored down by Bleeker's firm Lesh-esque bass, ebbing and flowing, occasionally enriched with flourishes of country piano, soft synths and slide guitar. Several songs, like the album's rousing first single "It's Real" were written by Courtney in the way he wrote some of his first songs, laying out their architecture first on a bass rather than a guitar, allowing him to evolve the song's basic melody. Others, like "Green Aisles" and the Bleeker-fronted "Wonder Years" formed out of extended jams, providing them a fluid structure that only a band of craftsmen could make sound so effortless and guided. Courtney has also matured as a lyricist, adeptly capturing and singing youth's most potent crystalline moments with a surgeon's precision. He wrote most of the songs on Days early in the morning, immediately upon waking up, when the unscripted promise of a new day was still in its purest form. In "Green Aisles" he sings "all those aimless drives through green aisles / our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise". Such a sentiment is an almost perfect lens through which to view Days, the coming of age album they've made. Days is greater than the sum of its parts, as defined by its ebullient moments as it is by its moments of restraint. Lyrically and melodically part of what makes Real Estate’s music so vital are the moments where the disarmingly simple is made unexpectedly profound.
New Jersey is the central character of this record - its placid, boring microcities/municipalities juxtaposed with the often-overlooked majesty of its forests and oceans. Courtney, Bleeker and Mondanile don't view this place with the oft-repeated disdain and criticism associated with one of America’s less cool states, but with a bemused sense of wonder and appreciation. It’s where they’re from, what fostered them – and, for better or worse – what has shaped them. Unlike many artists who deny their origins preferring to cultivate an aura of urban hardness and experience at the cost of genuine reflections, Real Estate sing about exactly where they come from.
To quote “Green Aisles” again, for Martin “all that wasted time,” is maybe “not so unwise” because the careless sensations of youth that seem trivial in the adult world are actually something that endure and influence us long
King Krule
With his debut single “Out Getting Ribs/ Has This Hit”, King Krule (formerly known as Zoo Kid, but still the musical alias of 17 year old Archy Marshall) announced himself as the startling voice of a new generation; his unexpectedly deep and mournful baritone tracing fissures of disappointment and disorientation to devastating effect. Comprised only of his stark vocals, guitar and searing lines such as “and I’m the only one believing/ there’s nothing to believe in”, it was a bleak but brilliant treatise on the inchoate frustration and fury of youth, rubbed raw and laid bare.
Now comes his second release, and with it, an expansion of vision, both musically and thematically. The connective tissue between these 5 tracks is still Marshall’s lyrics of searing clarity, but over the span of the self-titled EP, there is an arresting sonic progression, as his songs open up to become a loose knit meditation on regret and discontent, loss of faith and renewal of hope, and optimism in the face of desperation. Opening track “Bleak Bake”, for instance, opens with twinkling keyboards and Marshall clearing his throat, before sampled strings swoon in and he sighs, “everything hits you in the end”. “The Noose of Jah City” drives the knife in deeper, with Marshall singing of being “suffocated in concrete” over a lushly upholstered backdrop of chiming guitars and beats, while in the gorgeous “Portrait in Black and Blue” he concludes, ruefully, that “time never gave me a chance…trapped in a lizard state/ looking for an escape”. But even though the subject matter may at times be harrowing, the songs themselves are never anything less than exquisitely crafted, possessed of an almost spectral beauty, as epitomised in the shimmering instrumental “Intro”. Taken as a whole, the “King Krule” EP is the sound of a young man growing up and attempting to grapple with the realities of the world he inhabits, and a fascinating, brutal journey it is too.
Now comes his second release, and with it, an expansion of vision, both musically and thematically. The connective tissue between these 5 tracks is still Marshall’s lyrics of searing clarity, but over the span of the self-titled EP, there is an arresting sonic progression, as his songs open up to become a loose knit meditation on regret and discontent, loss of faith and renewal of hope, and optimism in the face of desperation. Opening track “Bleak Bake”, for instance, opens with twinkling keyboards and Marshall clearing his throat, before sampled strings swoon in and he sighs, “everything hits you in the end”. “The Noose of Jah City” drives the knife in deeper, with Marshall singing of being “suffocated in concrete” over a lushly upholstered backdrop of chiming guitars and beats, while in the gorgeous “Portrait in Black and Blue” he concludes, ruefully, that “time never gave me a chance…trapped in a lizard state/ looking for an escape”. But even though the subject matter may at times be harrowing, the songs themselves are never anything less than exquisitely crafted, possessed of an almost spectral beauty, as epitomised in the shimmering instrumental “Intro”. Taken as a whole, the “King Krule” EP is the sound of a young man growing up and attempting to grapple with the realities of the world he inhabits, and a fascinating, brutal journey it is too.
