“The girls belong to anybody with access to a dictaphone,” says Miss Naomi Faust in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. She is referring to the women of the Girl Pool, a typing bureau in the basement of the laboratory where Dr Asa Breed and Co. are developing, among other things, deadly weapons (‘deadly’ in an extinction-of-all-life-on-Earth sort of way). “They serve science too,” Dr Breed explains, “even though they may not understand a word of it. God bless them, every one.”
Girlpool is Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad. The pair met at high school and developed their musical aspirations in LA at The Smell, an all ages, drug/alcohol free underground club that has played a part in the career of a number of noise bands (see The Mae Shi, No Age, Abe Vigoda). Unlike the aforementioned bands, Girlpool make relatively simple indie rock music sans drums, relying on their distinctive vocals and cutting lyrics to make the impact. The result is a slightly skewed guitar-driven EP that feels continuously on the verge of spilling over, restrained but for how long?
You can probably guess the main target of this barely restrained fervour from what I’ve already said about the band’s name. Tasked with listening to the “faceless voices of scientists on dictaphone records,” the women of the Vonnegut’s Girl Pool leave their “cloister of cement” only once a year to go “a-carolling” and get chocolate bars at Christmas time. The song ‘Blah Blah Blah’ captures the ridiculousness of the fact that these women (read: any women) are controlled by “anybody with a dictaphone,” i.e. even the most uninspiring, unoriginal, banal men:
“You leave me crying in the fucking rain
I want you
You’re too busy watching other girls
In the little skirts, with their pretty curls
Why don’t you
Hot one you know you want it
Then when you find you got it
You call me
I hear you talking like
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH”
Next song ‘Paint Me Colours’ looks at privilege through the prism of teenage heartbreak: “I’ll never understand what it means to be a man who is white ‘cos he never has to fight.” This grounding of big ideas (racial/gender discrimination) in ‘normal’ things (teen angst) works really well, although of course the big ideas are intrinsically linked with and impact upon normality. ‘Slutmouth,’ opening with the line “sometimes I want to be a boy,” challenges just what ‘normal’ is in our society, dealing with the belittling ‘norms’ such as street harassment (I don’t wanna get fucked / by a fucked society / cos everywhere I look / someone’s blaming me / I don’t really care about the clothes I wear”) and social expectation (“I go to school every day / just to be made a housewife one day”).
The single ‘Jane’ gets back to more hopeful messages. Detailing how the titular character punches a boy called Tommy in the mouth (bear with me). The song implores people in similar situations to heed their advice, a call to arms to all facing inequality, a conviction that things can and will be better:
“Girls and boys if you are listening
Don’t ever feel imprisoned
Feeling like your mouth is glued tight shut.
You were born for a reason
Share all of your feelings
If you are a Jane put your fists up too.”
While I’ve never seen the cloister of cement, or handed out sweets to it’s inhabitants during the holidays, I’m sure the music world has long had it’s own version of the Girl Pool. Picking up where Bikini Kill et al. left off, Girlpool’s music seems like a reaction against this. But it is to their credit that the album isn’t a scream-filled futile rage but instead an assured confidence, a determination to say things as they are. Coupling lyrics of everyday feelings with high-pitched screams of frustration, they come across not as hyperrealistic freedom fighters, but as real people with a just cause, people growing bolder with every small success, people ready to stand up for what is right. Things have changed for the better but the playing field still isn’t level, and the unerring confidence of Tucker and Tividad plays like the hammer blows against any remaining walls of the cloister of cement.
The EP is out now on Wichita Recordings and you can buy it here.