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100Studio majesty be darned, this could prove a modern classic regardless.
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91The canniness of Album's production choices and the scuzzy depression of the lyrics and the gut-level songwriting instincts, along with everything else about the record, add up to something elusive and fascinating--maybe even heartbreaking.
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Girls are genuine drop-outs, bona-fide freaks who've made a record far removed from the predictable cycles of the music industry. Now that's a real story.
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90Created by two genuine outsiders and made with a refreshing lack of irony, Album is a welcome addition to the very best albums of 2009.
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Album is one of the year's most bracing pop releases, and one of the best, a devastatingly fresh reframing of the pop songbook.
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Girls are poised to take their rightful place as one of the blog-crossover bands of 2009.
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It's better to approach Album not as what its title offers, but a collection of singles. These are the new rock 'n' roll 45s, variations of the same sad pop song shone through the prism of a guy who's survived his own unique heartache.
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Despite having ties to shitgaze, this isn't a record obsessed with that aesthetic, and this works to its advantage, since these songs clearly aspire to be bigger than that and have very real potential to be.
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Its their frivolous experimentalism and willingness to toy with all aspects of the past that make Girls such an invitingly warm and honest proposition
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80While not as fleshed out as some other remarkable debuts, Album is a fully realized personal vision.
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80Realised with friend Chet JR White in San Francisco on reel-to-reel tapes, the songs grab from Phil Spector, Beatles, Beach Boys, JAMC and Spiritualized, and are all the more enticing for it. [Jan 2010, p. 103]
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80Album lurches bizarrely from the heart-rending to the goofy to the simply spaced-out, but what it lacks in polish it makes up for with buckets of charm.
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Girls' 2009 album (simply titled Album) actually proved itself worthy of the hype upon its release.
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Even if Album doesn't turn out to be all it's been made out to be by the reams of hype already bestowed upon it, it's certainly working at the moment.
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What makes Album so good, however, won't be a consensus opinion on whether or not it's culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. It'll be the personal associations brought to it by each person encountering Girls for the first time.
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On Girls' debut, Christopher Owens' made peace with his past and crafted ace tunes to go with his tales of redemption.
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Girls are, at their most basic, a solid band of rock 'n' roll reappropriators.
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60What potentially made Album exciting was that it seemed to understand that pop itself doesn't make sense, and that it can still work just as well with all the wrong notes in all the wrong order.
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60Don't get me wrong, Album's best songs (Lust for Life, Laura, and Hellhole Ratrace) are utterly essential, but take these out of the equation and there's really very little to get excited about. Unless you count the band's back-story, that is.
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60While the songwriting draws heavily on bigwigs such as Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson, albeit ckloaked in layers of woozy production. This is its chief asset, providing a dark undertow. [Oct 2009, p.111]
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Refashioning 60s pop for today's pilled-up generation? Not such a bad idea, as it happens, even if it is a bit Spiritualized.
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Somehow, though, they forgot the crucial dollop of excitement or charisma, so we're left with an earful of directionless heartbreak and failure.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 15
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Mixed: 0 out of 15
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Negative: 3 out of 15
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ChristianP.3Embarrassingly overrated. one great song, and even that is about twice as long as it needs to be. What a bore.