he 9:30 club wasn’t sold out Sept. 19. If you had casually bought a ticket, unfamiliar with Girls’ exemplary three albums, you may not have picked up on the current of energy that ran through the crowd. To new ears, Girls’ set at 9:30 may have been perfectly enjoyable and completely forgettable.
But Girls isn’t a band that attracts the more superficial kind of fan.
Over the course of the past three years, the indie rock community has fallen under the San Francisco band’s spell. The sphere of Internet music blogs, obsessed with micro-analyzing every aspect of a song, fell in love with Girls’ ageless rock.
Fans were smitten by frontman Christopher Owens and his endlessly fascinating life story — he belonged to the Children of God cult as a child and lived on the streets.
On the band’s newest album, “Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” Owens crafts one of the strongest albums of the year by pairing adopted riffs and melodies from other songs with simple lyrics, unadorned with wordplay or fancy vocabulary.
And from the second Owens and the rest of Girls came on stage, the night was magic.
The concert was tailor-made for Girls’ fans. Both openers, Papa and Nobunny, were side projects of Girls’ members, and Owens played a varied set, opening with the bluesy “Darling” from his first album and interspersing songs from last year’s “Broken Dreams Club EP” with the band’s more popular singles.
Owens, sporting a Hawaiian pajama shirt and a Kurt Cobain haircut, eschewed the snotty self-mockery seen on his first album to give an earnest and sincere performance. He held the crowd in a trance, and they went wild as he lay on stage for the outro in “Laura” and launched into dance during the galloping drums that kick off “Honey Bunny.”
Not a single song fell flat, and the crowd’s energy rarely lagged during the band’s sublime surf-rockers “Honey Bunny,” “Lust for Life” and “Magic.” The audience responded just as powerfully to the slower songs, swaying to the soulful “Love Like a River” and wailing away in an immense sing-along to first album standout “Hellhole Ratrace.”
It’s easy to forget, especially after regularly attendingconcerts, how live music has the potential to be a moving and transformative experience.
Girls’ set was full of moments that other bands spend a career trying to create, from the band’s heart-stopping rendition of “Jamie Marie” during the encore, complete with 1960s organ, to the soaring refrain of the “Father, Son, Holy Ghost” single “Vomit.” The name, a reference to a Proverbs verse, “Vomit” is a song about loneliness and troubled love, and as Owens repeated the lyric, “Come into my heart” amid an epic guitar build, the audience was utterly entranced.
Perhaps the more distracted audience members at 9:30 club Sept. 19 missed out on the mystical quality of Girls’ performance. But anyone who came to see Girls with a vested interest in the band as richly rewarded with an unforgettable performance.
Critics will debate whether Girls’ new album is the best of 2011, but for the most devoted of Girls fans, 9:30 club will not see a better performance this year than Chris Owens’ masterful set.
