Father, Son and Holy Ghost- girls review

There’s been an awful lot of hype surrounding Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the second album from Girls. Following their debut album, the appropriately titled Album, fans expected much of the same: dreamy Cali-pop melodies and lead singer Christopher Owen’s simple and purposefully naïve voice combining to make an endlessly interesting LP with a few devastatingly good songs. They weren’t far wrong. Father Son and Holy Ghost is all that and then some- a treacherously simple record that builds on the melodic brilliance of Album with a floaty, eerie vibe which combines to make the best pop record released this year.

Much of the initial intrigue surrounding Girlsrevolved around Christopher Owen’s backstory: raised in the infamous Children of God cult, Owens travelled all over Eastern Europe and Asia as a child, running away at the age of sixteen to Amarillo, Texas, where he promptly fell into punk and under the mentorship of eccentric millionaire artist and philanthropist Stanley Marsh III. There’s nothing autobiographical about Father, per se, it’s more that knowledge of Owen’s upbringing helps the listener to decode its doo-wop overtones; you can hear the 60’s hippie origins of Children of God in Father’s Beach Boys- esque sound, and their borrowed simplicity only highlights an uncanny ‘otherness’ around the lyrics, so that when Owens croons: ‘It’s so hard to feel so alone/ And so far, so far from home/ And you my Ma’, on ‘My Ma’, the picture that emerges is not only of run-of-the-mill adolescent childhood-sickness in the manner of homesickness, but of a teenager adrift in Texas, separated from his mother by an ocean, two continents and a life-stealing doctrine from which many never re-emerged.

Much of the subject matter is, fittingly, about girls: the opener, ‘Honey Bunny’, contains the immortal lines ‘They don’t like my bony body/ They don’t like my dirty hair’, evoking the image of an utterly youthful narrator: perhaps a 14-year old Nirvana fan with a self esteem problem, looking forwards to a time when girls will ‘love me/ For all the reasons everyone hates me’. There is an innocence here that is intimately twisted in with adolescence: a greasy-haired boy who is still wide-eyed about girls. But for all this innocence, there’s nothing immature about Father; its maturity comes in the manipulation of the initial impression of innocence, which is slowly dashed as the record moves on. The slow, dreary guitar of ‘Vomit’, which periodically erupts into psych-rock solos as Owens repeats the line ‘looking for you, baby’, is an expression of the repetitive nature of misery and longing; proof that there are darker emotions bubbling under the simplicity.

Father, Son and Holy Ghost sounds like everything and nothing you’ve ever heard before; entrenched in the past, it nevertheless sounds like the future. Whispery, spacey and meandering, the barely-sensed shady undertones gives it its bite, and throughout it all runs Christopher Owens; his voice; his life.