Kevin Bronson on April 18th, 2010

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Who: Girls at the Gobi Tent
In 3 or Fewer Words: Hipster hype justified.
I’ll Remember This Set At Least Until Pitchfork Selects Another Lo-fi Band for Me To Insecurely Adulate Because: At first, it didn’t quite feel like San Francisco’s Girls were going to live up to the sea of blog hype generated by their debut, “Album,” due mostly to the fact that their smaller, insular sound, in which former Children of God member Christopher Owens discovers all the music he missed as a child (true or not, that’s a great band myth for the PR people), simply felt too fragile for a mid-afternoon tent packed tight with savvy listeners and trendies alike. This is headphones music, meant at the most to inhabit a small, smoke-clouded clubs, and the large, open tent would have managed to topple the young band had it not been for a series of near-overwhelming (hey, it was hot and I was tired – I was easily moved) pop crescendos near the end, along with the always fun Girls game of Name That Pastiche. It was mid-set when Owens and company began to take control of the tent, first with an elegiac cover of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream,” followed by a crowd- (and ear-) pleasing rendition of their own “Lust for Life.” However, it was their extended, slowly building take on “Hellhole Ratrace” that won the day–a ballad that gently unfurls from wistful melancholy to churning, chest-rattling guitar rocker in just under 10 minutes, “Ratrace” bound together and defined all the disparate elements of Girls’ sound (think Elvis Costello piping the Beach Boys and the Ronettes through a set of headphones while crashing on a bean bag chair in his Imperial Bedroom).
What I’d Tell My Friend  Who Was at Camera Obscura: “Hellhole Ratrace” was once of while offering Coachella 2010’s “Best Of” moments.
– Travis Woods (Web In Front). Photo: Scott Dudelson.