Reviewed on Tuesday January 26 (photo by Jamie Williams)
Every band on the planet has a media-manipulated narrative, one that becomes the shorthand way for critics to ‘explain’ them and their music. Up to this point, the story that has been chosen for Girlpool is fixated on their age, and most reviewers have cast them as little more than glorified high schoolers noodling about in their garage, flipping through their diaries and listing their crushes.
What such a narrative has no room for is their sheer volume, or the unavoidable emotional heft of their songs. This energy and abandon is even more obvious when one experiences them live, particularly in the cramped confines of the Spiegeltent. With each song they seemed to grow, their bodies elongating till they became pale giants, towering above the diminished crowd.
Indeed, the closer you are to Girlpool the more their music makes sense; as though you have gone from facing them to standing by their side, making right flip to left. Songs like the tender and gently tormented ‘Dear Nora’ took on an added level of power live, and grungy solos broke out like spot fires, with reverb-drenched guitar adding immediacy to a song like ‘Before The World Was Big’. Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker revealed themselves to be performers of the highest order, dancing in stiff-legged circles around each other, their stunted waltz an oddly powerful addition to the music.
Not even a false start or an ongoing battle with a faulty cable could stop them: oddly, such flaws only contributed to their music. Girlpool’s tunes are, after all, deeply rooted in the language of frailty and failure, filled with a heady mix of self-loathing and longing that some critics have mistakenly identified as being unique to adolescents.
After all, songs like ‘Cherry Picking’ and the heartbreaking ‘I Like That You Can See It’ are written in a universal tongue. Though they may have had some in the Spiegeltent reflecting back on their own misspent youth, this reviewer was struck by how closely his own thoughts and desires aligned with those belonging to a pair of musicians he has never met hailing from a country he has never visited. This is the power of their music, and indeed the power of all great music: with each song, they embedded themselves in the life of total strangers, blowing out a private world until it stretched the length of a universe.
