Girls

Maxwell’s; Mon 2
Bowery Ballroom; Nov 6

Photograph: Sandy Kim

Like a number of his contemporaries, Girls singer Christopher Owens is the scion of hippies. He spent his youth in Children of God, a cult founded by Moses David—a self-styled prophet famous for apocalyptic predictions that, without exception, failed to materialize. Owens split with the organization as a teenager, though not before picking up musical cues and obtaining his first guitar from a fellow Child of God: former Fleetwood Mac member Jeremy Spencer. Say what you will about sinister religious cults, they sure can sing.

Girls pairs Owens with fellow San Franciscan JR White (in concert, the duo grows into a quartet). On its debut LP, dryly titled Album, the band breezily merges a range of ’60s sounds: Psychedelia collides with bubblegum pop, and Nuggets garage rock meets early Beach Boys riffs, often in a single phrase. Yet the musicians turn to the decade not with the rosy nostalgia that has become rock tradition, but rather with suspicion—a brooding undercurrent runs beneath this upbeat record. “I wish I had a father / Maybe then I would have turned out right,” Owens sings in “Lust for Life,” the band’s single and one of its many apparent attempts to leave no trace on Internet search engines. Even when his lyrics turn sanguine, Owens’s voice subverts them. He finds doom behind the brightest California sky—a utopian dream gone wrong.—Jay Ruttenberg

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