Like many indie California artists with interesting backgrounds, Girls has quickly moved from the lo-fi aesthetics of its charming debut, Album, to a return to Hi Fidelity of the early 70s. Frontman Christopher Owens still has that child-like sincerity in his lyrics, but now on Father, Son, Holy Ghost*, his voice has softened to that of a honey-tinged Elliott Smith, occasionally backed here by gospel singers. The songs are stretched out to allow for an incredible attention to detail, begging to hear the album on vinyl on a lazy sunny Sunday afternoon. Owens has confessed that Album was recorded in a heroin daze and that he's cleaned up his act, so it should be less of a surprise the amount of focus put into FSHG, but as last year's excellent EP Broken Dreams Club hinted, Owens and partner JR White were working towards this all along. The first two singles, "Vomit" and opener "Honey Bunny," are the perfect representatives of the spectrum that FSHG runs, as the album starts with a burst of energy and then pulls back the pace and brings out the gospel singers. The whole thing climaxes with the epic ballad "Forgiveness," which at about the 5:20 mark moves into a Crazy Horse stoned out jam. Girls' progression through these three releases is so wondrous to behold it's tempting to think about what's coming with the fourth, but that might spoil the beauty currently in hand.
*In title, Father, Son, Holy Ghost references Catholicism, which is interesting in that Owens grew up in the Children of God cult -- it takes one cult to recognize another.
It's tempting to look at Wild Flag as a sort of Sleater-Kinney 2.0, given it's got 2/3 of that illustrious band's members in Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss, but more than that, it's a celebration of music in general -- both the listening and the playing. With Mary Timony (Helium) and Rebecca Cole (The Minders) rounding out the quartet, the band's sound is one of rollicking guitars, Brownstein leg kicks and smiles reaching from ear to ear. Wild Flag starts out strong with the album's default anthem, "Romance," thanks to a Brownstein-Timony shared chorus of "We love the sound/The sound is what found us/Sound is the blood between me and you." The tracks get kind of choppy after that, trading between the slack dissonance of Timony and Brownstein's chop melodic energy -- these songs are all fine by themselves, they just feel a bit incongruous. About midway, during "Short Version," the two parts begin to meld and the rest of the album sounds like the band has found their sound. It's like they tracked the album to represent the growth of the band, a process the listener gets to experience in the convenient length of an album. The climax comes on "Racehorse," with Brownstein singing "Well I'm a racehorse. yeah I'm a racehorse. you put your money on me," leading me to believe if there's a filly out there named Wild Flag, money is being put on it, no matter the odds.
Three albums into her solo career, after getting a nice start with artists Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, Annie Clark's St. Vincent project is at the apex of a sort of "Art for Public Consumption" movement that we're currently enjoying in popular music. Between Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective and St. Vincent, 'difficult music' that still aims to be palatable has rarely been better, and Strange Mercy comes at a time when it should bring Clark to a much larger audience -- even the prog jazz bass flourishes seem ripe for a comeback in her hands. Clark has never sounded so confident and comfortable in her own skin as on tracks like "Cruel" and, especially, on "Cheerleader," which feels like her declaration to once and for all be her own woman, not the beautiful young woman who was once part of Sufjuan Stevens' touring clan. "I don't know what good it serves / Pouring my purse in the dirt / But I-I-I-I-I don't wanna be your cheerleader no more."
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