Girls – Album (2009)

When you name your band Girls and the first album is called Album, you make sure that it's difficult for people to Google you're band or your album. Even now, when you just write those two things on Spotify, you won't immediately find what you're looking for. I guess this might actually been intentional move on the part of this Californian indie rock band. Their music draws influences from Californian surf rock and from 60's pop music. The mood is very laid back and it feels like this really is music that is meant to be listened to in the laid back surfer communities of California. The guitars sound charmingly authentic and you can hear every strum. That's what I really like about this band's sound. It definitely isn't ruined with sleazy studio polishing. The laconic vocals are also amazingly fitting for this kind of lazy music.



Towards the end of 00's I was mainly just listening to indie rock in all its forms, but I felt like by that time all the bands had been around for many years and nothing new and exciting was coming out anymore. It then turned out that I was wrong about that, but I just didn't know how to find those small and interesting bands at that part of my life. Fortunately there was the Flow festival in Helsinki, which back in the day was still all about showcasing new talents and interesting new bands. Nowadays they just have massively big names with expensive tickets. This easily happens to successful festivals eventually. Anyway, back in the day I found quite a few interesting bands by listening to the line-up beforehand. In 2010 the line-up was really good and among other early-career indie bands, I found Girls. I really liked their music and bought this debut of theirs on vinyl even before the actual festival. I really also enjoyed their gig. It was great to see a band that you liked that had only released one album, because that meant that you were going to know every song they will play. It's so much more difficult with bands that have been around for decades.

The 2010 Flow festival might have actually been a point in my life when I realised that in order to keep finding new good music, I couldn't just rely on my friends to tell me about it. I had to do some work myself to find all of these bands that weren't well-known yet. Ever since, I've been the person who does lots of investigation to be on top of what is happening in the alternative music scene. At some point it even seemed strange to buy albums by bands I already owned albums by. This has more recently changed, but I have maintained an interest to obscure and strange bands.

My favourite track on the album is the first song Lust for Life. It's a bit confusing to call your hit song that knowing about the hugely popular Iggy Pop song, but anyway, this song is a great party song and there's also a great amateur-style music video that showcases the band's youthful and hipstery appearance. The next song Laura completely changes the mood of the album, but I also really like the calm and laid-back feel of this song. Hellhole Retrace reminds me of the artfulness of Velvet Underground and in all its obscurity, it's a great song. Morning Light sounds like a song that predicted soon to appear indie band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart by its similar kinds of fast paced shoegaze sounds.

I was really excited about this debut album back in the day, but their second album turned out to be a huge disappointment to me. It was so boring that I kind of lost my faith in this band afterwards. That seemed to happen a lot with these new indie bands. They make one good album and after that they've given all they have. At least they made this great album that I still like after nearly ten years later.

Listen to the album on Spotify.