Quick Before it Melts

Friday 30 October 2009

Little Girls, Concepts

I’ve pretty much known all week that I’d be following up my Atlas Sound post with one about Little Girls, but I wasn’t sure (and still am not) about what kind of angle I was going to take on it.  Back in June I was totally digging the sonic sound collisions Josh McIntyre was posting over at the Little Girls Myspace page, having compared his song “Tambourine” to Pixies doing Joy Division, sounding all gothic surf punk, but the concept of a whole album’s worth of the stuff?

Strangely enough, that’s just what McIntyre has named his official debut LP: Concepts is 10 tracks with no real discernible lyrical content, but with a singular musical voice.  With only that Peter Hook-indebted bass as the album’s through-line, McIntyre has managed to build an impressive wall of sound, full of fuzzed out guitar, discordant echoes, raw percussion and buzz saw overdubs.  I have to admit it is all a bit much to take in in a single sitting, but those who do will be rewarded with a pretty amazing musical experience.  There’s something so ominous about the guitar line in “Salt Swimmers”, coupled with another round of distorted vocal wailing, and then something so precious about the way “Growing” crescendos and peaks with an emotional high, that you really can’t make heads or tails of the album at all.  It will be a long while before I think I can expertly pick out any one track from the album, but that’s a credit to McIntyre:  Concepts is very much an album as a whole, greater than the sum of its parts and all the better for it.

Imagine that, a whole album that’s pretty spectacular from beginning to end.  Now that’s a new concept.

MP3: Little Girls “Growing”
Myspace: Little Girls

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by J. Di Gioia | 3 Comments »

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