Girlpool: What Chaos Is Imaginary

Listening to Girlpool’s startling 2015 debutBefore the World Was Big felt like digging into a bag of saltwater taffy, unwrapping small portions that were taut, sticky sweet, and a little bit briny. On “Ideal World” and “Crowded Stranger,” Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker sang in bright unison, delivering lyrics about the tribulations of teenager-hood through the vocal equivalent of a forced smile.
The two voices would interlock, jump into a quick harmony, and then merge back into unison, constantly fluttering between brashness and ingratiation, confrontation and introspection. Comedy and camp occasionally crept in, most notably when Tividad and Tucker slipped into childlike vernacular while musing on world-weary themes: “I just miss how it felt standing next to you / Wearing matching dresses before the world was big.” Often backed by only electric guitar and bass, early Girlpool vacuum-sealed that “big world” into compressed units, with songs as short as 39 seconds and the whole LP running less than half an hour. You could inhale the whole thing in the course of a brisk afternoon walk.
On its third album, What Chaos Is Imaginary, Girlpool has given the music room to stretch out, inflate and generally take up more space—not just in total running time but also in thematic scope and instrumental accompaniment. What Chaos was produced by David Tolomei, who has engineered records for Beach House, Daughter, Torres, and other groups known for summoning darkness through bold vocals swirled into maelstroms of electronic noise. The album thickens Girlpool’s sound by adding drum tracks, synthesizers, and even a string octet on the title track. Dreary, sustained organ chords have become a sonic hallmark, as have grungy guitars and multi-tracked vocals trudging forward at a dour pace. (The cut “Minute in Your Mind” exemplifies this tendency.) In many ways, this new aesthetic suits Girlpool’s evolution: from a point-of-view that was unabashedly adolescent to a phase of young adulthood often processed through wandering rumination rather than pithy, sarcastic takes on life. But this newfound expansiveness comes with certain drawbacks, for pulling something into new and bigger shapes risks stretching the material thin.