AEM075 Girlfriends

Once in a blue moon a move­ment kicks up on the scene that makes a big fuss over the way an artist’s music finds its way to the listener’s eardrums. Remem­ber the 4-track hul­la­baloo in the 90s? Didn’t mat­ter if the music was the most god awful shit ever produced–if it was churned out on one of those cheap Aiwa 4-track recorders, then it deserved a lis­ten. Now finally the twenty-first cen­tury has its own trend: cas­sette rock! Fash­ions of this sort can be fairly hit-or-miss. If the bands’ style of deliv­ery doesn’t mesh with the style of pro­duc­tion, the whole approach can come off as a mis­fire. Do you really want to hear Dark Side of the Moon redone on four tracks? Or how about Lead­belly in a twenty mil­lion dol­lar stu­dio? If the shoe doesn’t fit, you can’t wear it. Luck­ily for Girl­friends the shoe fits just right. There is some­thing about the cheeky, cheapo fun of tapes that cap­tures their approach per­fectly. There is a cream to every crop, and cas­sette rock may have found its very first keeper in Girlfriends.

The band out of Boston wastes no time on styl­is­tic curlicues in their com­po­si­tions. Fuzzed-out, stomp-boxed 60s power pop melodies grab you in the first few sec­onds and don’t let go. The songs are short, direct, noisy– and that’s exactly how the trio of Ben Potrykus (gui­tar), Jen Dowty (bass) and Andy Sad­oway (drums) like it. Their first EP Our Very First Cas­sette, released late 2009, was a quick and dirty romp that got solid reviews from crit­ics and tastemak­ers. Though the band’s approach sounds sim­ple, there’s a com­plex­ity bub­bling beneath the sur­face that holds your atten­tion. The jagged gui­tar lines and off-the-cuff vocals are tossed off like the mad strokes of an action painter in full frenzy, while remain­ing con­fined within pop art super­struc­tures. Imag­ine Jack­son Pol­lack, drunk on corn whiskey, try­ing to copy Warhol’s soup cans: a superla­tive mess that nonethe­less attains a cer­tain iter­a­tive fas­ci­na­tion. Girl­friends took a sim­i­lar tack on the EP, trad­ing on the listener’s famil­iar­ity with cer­tain pop forms to intro­duce a decid­edly unfa­mil­iar sav­agery into the pro­ceed­ings. The song “suckin rare meat off the bone white china” mixes wham­mied gui­tar, mega­phone vocals, and some rough Beach Boys’ har­monies into a beastly surf safari. “bites + scratches” cap­tures Girl­friends in a more reflec­tive, Pogues-mode, attempt­ing to muster up a mood of good old-fashioned heart­break. It’s a great song, but the heart­break isn’t entirely per­sua­sive. The riffs are just too damn fun to frown over.

The ease with which Girl­friends tra­verses the pop reg­is­ter is a tes­ta­ment to their ori­gins out of the roil­ing, moil­ing caul­dron that is the Boston music scene. Dis­count booze and col­lege kids aplenty keep the clubs filled while the insane 1am clos­ing time of the sub­way pre­serves a niche for late night DIY house par­ties. The give and take between pub­lic and pri­vate forums sus­tains an occa­sion­ally inspired dialec­tic within the scene. “2004 was a for­ma­tive year for me,” as Potrykus recalls, “cos I started liv­ing in the city in late 2003 and I saw and met Click­ers and Night Rally and the Faux and the Mules and Dream­house and Nep­tune, and now Denial and, I think, Wildildlife (they were just ‘Wildlife’ then) and every­one was being really loud and noisy and split­ting their time between base­ments and clubs, which I thought made things a lot more inter­est­ing.” That’s quite a list of bands; but what artist can resist the louche allure of down-and-out of bohemian Boston, of Jamaica Plains, of All­ston “Rock City,” of Cam­bridge and Somerville? Breed­ing grounds, one and all, for raunchy rawk and fine pur­vey­ors (accord­ing to Potrykus) of “authen­tic south Amer­i­can food,” “organic fair trade mar­kets,” “thrift stores” and “all that crap.” When Potrykus, Dowty and Sad­oway aren’t shop­ping for ethically-reared beef to mix into their pica­d­inho de milho, the band mem­bers find time for other projects includ­ing Chris­tians & Lions and Magma Divers– that’s a pretty full plate.

For their A-side, Girl­friends chose “Good To Be True” from their first EP Our Very First Cas­sette. It’s a straight­for­ward Ramones-style bal­lad that has lived a few lives since the band recorded it late in 2009. On the first edi­tion of the cas­sette, “Good To Be True” starred an as-yet-unidentified “space alien laser” solo and might have been recorded in a shoe­box. In the words of Sad­oway, “Tapes sound like shit usu­ally, am I right?” For the Ampeater 7-inch, Girl­friends gave the song a quick spit­shine: bulk­ing up the vocals, bal­anc­ing the mix, and gen­er­ally bring­ing the track up to the stren­u­ous stan­dards of a self-proclaimed “garbage power trio.” While the “space alien laser” solo gets more or less dropped (you’ll have to see the live show for that, or dig up a first edi­tion cas­sette some­where) the crisper mix tar­gets two ele­ments that makes Girl­friends great: sing along lyrics and sim­ple song struc­tures. The lyrics of “Good To Be True” describe a downer nar­ra­tive of teenage emo­tional inse­cu­rity, but the words are set to a bouncy, jan­gly riff that is so catchy it’s impos­si­ble to brood.

The good vibes con­tinue on the B-side with a cover of the Vase­lines’ “The Day I Was a Horse.” Clock­ing in at a trim 1:39, the cover sat­is­fies the band’s appetite and predilec­tion for the short form. In fact, their longest song appears to be “I Was Here But I Dis­ap­pear” (3:22) from the EP. Com­ment­ing on the short form, Potrykus remarks, “…so many good bands and peo­ple are into writ­ing shorter songs again too– which I really like. Good two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minute songs are hard to beat some­times.” One notable mas­ter of the short form, the recently-passed Jay Reatard, appeared to be on the verge of rein­tro­duc­ing the main­stream to the unique pos­si­bil­i­ties of the short, sweet and sim­ple. Whether brevity makes a come­back will depend on bands like Girl­friends reach­ing back to a time before bloated Bjorkestras became the apple of every indie musician’s eye. Seri­ously, how much time is required to relate the absur­dity of “the day I was a horse”? Even the Meta­mor­pho­sis was a short story.

With the release of the sec­ond edi­tion of their debut EP, Girl­friends has shown the beaten-up, old cas­sette for­mat still holds some intrigue. Whether this her­alds a tri­umphant return to the cas­sette in gen­eral (don’t hold your breath) remains to be seen. The irony is, of course, that the Ampeater Review is releas­ing “Good To Be True” and “The Day I Was a Horse” as dig­i­tal pan­tomimes of a vinyl 7-inch. The world is topsy turvy with dif­fer­ent ways to lis­ten to music. The appeal of one spe­cific for­mat appears to be the same appeal of music sub­gen­res: a sense of com­mu­nity, a sense of belong­ing, a sense of whatever-let’s-party.

There’s a slew of bands that have recently released work in the cas­sette for­mat, like Quilt and Tru­man Pey­ote, and a ton more that are per­co­lat­ing within the same scene, includ­ing Kid Romance, Thick Shakes, Earth­quake Party!, Young Adults, Maine Coons, and more. These are bands that play all dif­fer­ent types of music– garage, elec­tronic, folk, psy­che­delia– so there doesn’t seem to be any coher­ent move­ment afoot. But one trait they do share is that they’re all putting together excit­ing new music that mer­its atten­tion: really, what more could you ask for?

Mike Gutier­rez

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