Little Girls
Concepts
(Paper Bag, 2009)

Whoever longs to return to high school and relive their “glory days” has watched too much television while drunk. What they most likely remember is a canned montage of hand-pumping, ticker tape glory, smooth pick-up lines, and perfect hair set to a feel-good soundtrack. For the rest of us not living in a fictional Midwestern town with a sassy grandma, it is a slow and, ultimately, awkward time when your body and mind are more reminiscent of the Toxic Avenger than Molly Ringwald.

Like that imperfect nostalgia, Little Girls’ Concepts is rife with growing pains. Pulling cues from garage rock, girl-group pop, and even a bit of the goth persuasion, Concepts’ lo-fi heavy is not without its high points, but the dearth of it is awkward and sometimes abrasive.

Perhaps it’s because they’re still adolescents. Started in the gray days of early 2009, Josh McIntyre began recording what would later be Little Girls at a homemade studio in Toronto. Gaining major attention from the internet gods, a few tracks on their MySpace page turned into two EPs, a single, and a spot at the Woodsist/Captured Tracks festival this summer. Concepts is the culmination of this whirlwind year.

Concepts dips slowly into its first track with “Youth Tunes”, a stripped-down ditty with tinkling loops and the snap-crackle-pop of distortion, peaking with samples of badgering (or perhaps scolding?) from a grown-up, and boils over in the remaining 10 seconds with sputtered picking from McIntyre’s guitar. Moving on with “Seeing”, the second track denatures further into something sloppy and disfigured, the droning vocals reminiscent of morning announcements read too close to the microphone.

But this is where the problem lies. Although an earmark of many lo-fi and noise-rock records—especially salient in the Captured Tracks clique is the drowning, sometimes ethereal sounds of their frontman’s voice—the arrangements are held together with scotch tape and popsicle sticks, and Little Girls’ brand of “shitgaze” seems more like peer pressure. “Salt Swimmers” and “Concepts” descend into the begrimed bassline lure of Joy Division, but it’s a mimeograph, the vocal parts splotching and obscuring what could be a consistent track, if only he would enunciate.

While the album backslides into depression with fragments of cold wave, it does pick up with “Thrills”, which contains more of a cha-cha snap coming from the rhythm section and vocals that maintain some semblance of melody while still keeping the cool-kid vibe. The album closes out with “Growing”, and some of the fuck-all snide evaporates while Little Girls embrace a little pop sensibility.

Concepts sounds like an impulsive act by Little Girls. Afraid to be late-bloomers, the band seemed to rush to record all of their work too quickly, without letting it mature. There is certainly potential to make something out of themselves, so long as they don’t try to grow up too fast.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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