Girls frontman Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God cult. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn't believe in medical attention. His dad left. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself. As a teenager, Owens fled and lived as a Texas gutter-punk for a while. Then a local millionaire took Owens under his wing, and Owens moved to San Francisco. There, he and Chet "JR" White formed Girls, and recorded Album, their debut album, under the influence of just about every kind of pill they could find.
As band origin stories go, this one is so epically sad and squalid and ultimately triumphant that nobody could make it up. It's the sort of story that can overwhelm a band so completely that you never really hear their music; you only hear the story. So it's a tribute to Album that you don't need to know one word of that first paragraph to hear it as what it is: a dizzily powerful piece of work. That's partly because you don't need to know Owens' story to intuit that there's something going on here. When I saw the band play SXSW, knowing nothing about them beyond their compulsively listenable "Hellhole Ratrace" single, I wrote that the band's music sounds "like the work of one deeply weird and possibly sad person."
That's largely because of Owens' enormously evocative voice, a hiccupy thing that feels like a direct descendant of every sad nerd genius in pop history. The immediate obvious reference point is Elvis Costello, but you can also hear shards of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison and Paul McCartney and Morrissey. Owens never brays or moans or snarls; he sings simple songs about heartbreak with the internalized classicism of someone who's been listening to oldies radio in his sleep his whole life. He's playful; he has fun with it. But there's always a wounded, raggedy quaver at the back of his throat, one that implies worlds of hurt beyond the simple breakup songs he's singing.
And make no mistake; most of the songs on the Girls album are about, well, girls. Owens reportedly wrote much of the album in the aftermath of a bad breakup. There's one song called "Laura" and another called "Lauren Marie", so he's presumably got someone in mind. But he never falls into emo laceration, instead delivering his sentiments with conversational directness: "You've been a bitch, I've been an ass/ I don't wanna point the finger; I just know I don't like this, I don't wanna do this." But even his most innocuous classic-pop lyrics hint at a deep-seated fucked-upedness. On "Goddamn", he gets downright creepy over glimmering acoustic guitars and "Ghost Town" percussion-rattles: "Just give all your attention to me." "Headache" is just as fragile and reverby, and Owens cops a half-joking lounge-singer baritone to sing, "Let's be the people that we want to be/ Let's live like we could never part"-- implying, of course, that he's not already the person he wants to be. And he starts out "Hellhole Ratrace", the band's first single, with this: "I'm sick and tired of the way that I feel." He's a broken man.