The Bowery Presents

The Bowery Presents upcoming shows

GIRLS

Dum Dum Girls / Leisure

Venue:
Date:
Sat 4/03
Notes:
18+
Doors: 6:00 PM / Show: 7:00 PM
$20.00
Tickets
GIRLS
myspace
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.
Dum Dum Girls
myspace
Led by Dee Dee, Dum Dum Girls churn out pop music that adheres to her self-proclaimed M.O.: “blissed-out buzz saw.” Dee Dee formed DDG in late 2008 as a solo project—the name a nod to both The Vaselines’ album, Dum-Dum, and the Iggy Pop song “Dum Dum Boys”— and released a home-recorded CDR on her label Zoo Music followed by a 7" on HoZac and a 12" EP on Captured Tracks.

When Dee Dee needed a band to take her songs out of the bedroom, she looked to her friends: Jules, a San Diego-based furniture designer; Bambi, a non-profit worker in Austin; and Brooklynite Frankie Rose, a former Vivian Girl and Crystal Stilt, currently starting her own project as well. When the other three met for the first time a week before CMJ 2009, it was an instant girl gang.

Dee Dee wrote and recorded the songs that became I Will Be over the first eight months of 2009, and she asked a few others to contribute. Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner plays on “Yours Alone.” Crocodiles’ Brandon Welchez sings and plays guitar on the duet “Blank Girl.” And Los Angeles musician Andrew Miller contributes guitars to a number of tracks.

When it came time to choose someone to gently finesse I Will Be, the name Richard Gottehrer came up on Dee Dee’s wish list. Responsible for writing such seminal songs as “My Boyfriend’s Back,” and “I Want Candy,” he also produced his own short-lived band The Strangeloves, as well as The Voidoids, Blondie, The Go-Gos, and more recently, The Raveonettes. Marvels Dee Dee, “I gave him all the rough tracks and he produced them, as I had a lot of digital effects acting as sort of placeholders. I’m not exactly sure what he did, but it’s a world of difference. The songs sound warm, and they kind of sparkle.”

I Will Be runs just under thirty minutes with eleven songs; a short tribute to love, loss, fear, fun, and the classic pop form of the ‘60s girl groups and early punk rockers. Explaining the album’s dark-and-sunny feel, Dee Dee says, “There’s an overdramatic tone, much like a teenager’s world, but applied to the experience of getting older.” No track better exemplifies that sentiment than the somnolent “Rest of Our Lives,” a lullaby about marriage that captures, she says, “that feeling when you’re 16 and you think you’re going to be with your boyfriend forever. And that you’d just die if you weren’t. Except it’s about my husband.”

On the other end of the spectrum, “Bhang Bhang, I’m a Burnout” (the curious spelling being slang for marijuana) spends roughly two-and-a-half minutes musing on the virtues of psychedelics. And “Lines Her Eyes” touches on petty girl-on-girl competition, while “Jail La La” updates the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought the Law” with a reverb-laden sing-along.

What’s with the bipolar songs? “I tend to be an introvert. So there’s a lot of time for weird thoughts to develop in my head before I put them down on paper,” says Dee Dee. “And it’s really bizarre living in Southern California. It’s that total stereotype of being super-laidback, this ‘everything’s perfect’ vibe. But you’re miserable in the sun because you’re stuck. Like, it’s so perfect that it’s overwhelming and depressing. That’s sorta inspiring.”
Leisure
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Cambridge’s Leisure are a pop band, though not in the over-produced, over-compressed sense that might come to mind. Instead, Leisure look back to when pop was great, innovative music. Their sound blends the dramatic flair of icons like David Bowie or Queen with a definite musical root in early 90s Britpop. You can also hear chamber pop influences in their arrangements, which include vivid strings and piano. It’s a sound that’s as powerful as it is intricate, conceding none of its depth while being shaped around simple pop structures.

Since their formation back in 2009, Leisure have been working diligently in their warehouse practice space, bringing their repertoire of songs up to their own high standards, and only recently taking them to the stage. Still, if their sell-out show as part of our TeaRoom Tuesdays concert series back in February was any indicator, it won’t be long before these guys are wowing wide audiences even outside the Boston scene.

-Kevin Junker, Teapartyboston.com
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