All the Real Girls
My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
self-released
Click to hear: “Liquid Cure (The Way Life Should Be)”
All the Real Girls is the Foreigner of the local music scene. Like Foreigner, this new quartet makes vapid mainstream-radio-rock that’s catchy primarily because they repeat the chorus ad nauseam. That, and the power ballads.
However, the two groups do differ in one key respect: Foreigner was never this pretentious.
Producer Jon Nolan tugs the Girls toward the alt-country of his former band, Say Zuzu, on a few tracks, like “Scenes From the Hotel Weatherford,” on which singer/guitarist Peter Donovan gives us the line, “And I want to feel exactly how it felt the first time.” (See “Feels Like the First Time,” Foreigner, 1977).
But Friends is mostly predictable pop-rock in the mold of the opener, “The Night We First Met.” The Girls manage to sing the four-line chorus seven times in just over three minutes. Granted, that’s nothing compared to classics like “Hot Blooded,” “Urgent” or “Dirty White Boy” (“’Cause I’m a dirty white boy / Dirty white boy / Dirty white boy / Dirty white boy / Dirty white boy / Dirty white boy”), but it’s the same lame approach.
Lyrically, the Girls exhibit the fascination with alcohol common among the just-21 set. Booze is cool, dangerous, a way of life (see “Liquid Cure (The Way Life Should Be),” the album’s first single). All good points, but a cheap way to sound hip.
When the band tries harder to come off hip and worldly, it ends up sounding stupid, like a drunk college kid trying to impress erudite adults at his first real cocktail party. The most egregious example of this can be heard on the power ballad “Kid From California”: “I saw Axl Rose’s ghost / Playing cards and poppin’ pills / With Marilyn Monroe / At some party in the Hills.”
Look, Rose’s career may be dead, but he hasn’t given up the ghost yet. And the whole tableau, which grows to include Arthur Miller and Douglas MacArthur (?!), is beyond ridiculous in a song that purports to be heartfelt. (Killing off rock stars before their time seems to be a sub-theme of Friends: “Mayors of Minneapolis” references “the road where Bob Dylan died.” Why?)
Dylan gets name-checked or referenced three times on “Bringing It All Back Home” (Bruce Springsteen and The Beatles get shout-outs, too), but again, this comes off as a failed attempt to sound sophisticated. The song itself has none of the nuance or poetry of the albums it cites. Likewise, “Ogunquit ’74” laughably strives to place the young singer and a female counterpart in a time they could never have experienced. A more apt lyric would be “If we never get a minute more / Then don’t forget Foreigner’s 4.”
The album closes with the power ballad “The Night You Stopped Coming Home,” a title intended to serve as a bookend to the opener’s. There’s more drinking, more heartbreak and hope, and an extended coda muddied by a half-buried vocal sample, “Everybody’s had a broken heart,” which echoes the second track, “Everybody’s Got A Broken Heart.”
True enough, kid. True enough. Enough.
— Chris Busby
All the Real Girls play a CD release show on Sat., April 18, at Empire Dine and Dance, 575 Congress St., Portland, at 9 p.m., with openers Holy Boys Danger Club and Guitar Bomb. Tix: $5 (21+). 879-8988. For more on the band, visit myspace.com/alltherealgirls.
