Sidewalk Hustle

San Francisco’s Girls are my new favorite band.  I have been loop­ing there debut album, Album, since I noticed their pretty album cover at Rotate This last month.  Yes­ter­day I fell deeper in love with them when I saw the offi­cial video for their sin­gle ‘Lust for Life’. Even though the uncut ver­sion of this video is gar­ner­ing a lot of inter­est due to the hefty amount of care­free nudity it con­tains (watch it here), the offi­cial video is pos­si­bly a more stim­u­lat­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion of their true tal­ent and style.

The album has infec­tiously catchy songs like ‘Laura’ and ‘Sum­mer­time’ that make me want to jump up and down on my bed, while songs like ‘Hell­hole Retrace’ and ‘Ghost Mouth’ remind me of mem­o­ries and day­dreams you wish you could hold onto forever.

The bands ori­gin story is so unthink­ably sad (seri­ously, look it up) that you’d think it would over­shadow their music, but on the sur­face Girls sound quite light and happy, prob­a­bly because they recorded the album high on a jumbo sized grab-bag of pills. Fuck, I’d need pills too if I had a past like front­man Christo­pher Owen had. But beside the sad­ness sur­round­ing Owen’s early life, a lot of over­whelm­ingly light­hearted energy comes through on this album.

It’s no won­der the band, which inci­den­tally has no girls in it, has already tran­scended their local suc­cess, and lets be frank, after Pitch­fork gave their album a stel­lar rat­ing of 9.1, what band wouldn’t!? They’re tour­ing their debut album now across North Amer­ica hit­ting up Manhattan’s Bow­ery Ball­room, LA’s Trou­ba­dour, and luck­ily Toronto’s El Mocambo next month (Yay!).

To make their stop off in Toronto even more excit­ing, Jersey’s Brook­lyn based psychedelic-pop buzz band Real Estate will be open­ing!  I also have a minor crush on them and trust me, they’re cer­tainly a band to watch…“Budweiser Sprite, do you feel alright?”

Check out Girls’ video for “Lust For Life” from their sim­ply named debut album, Album.