The weekend comes and it is once more time to pick a colour and the colour chosen is red. A quick rummage through the vinyl archive at Bluesbunny Towers brought forth this 2009 single from Girls At Dawn on Chicago’s Hozac label, also a hostel to bands like Super Wild Horses and the Dum Dum Girls.
For those of you that aren’t au fait with the finer points of back room musical culture, Girls At Dawn are Erin Campbell (guitar), Ana Economou (bass), and Sarah Baldwin (drums) and they have had a pretty much uncontrolled set of releases on a whole variety of labels that highlight their not inconsiderable lo-fi charms with shoo-wop apparently being the correct name for their musical genre. Cute name for a genre methinks.
Anyway, this little red gem with the big hole (you did remember to order that big brass centre for singles from that nice man on EBay, didn’t you?) features two songs. Top side first - “Never Enough” has its fractured but adorable harmonies hidden in the middle of uncontrolled reverb, repetitive guitars patterns, bits of tambourine, drums in the distance and scant regard for sound quality. Not a lot really happens to tell the truth but this song just makes you smile. “Every Night” on the flipside is all cute harmonies, edgy guitars and random tempo changes and it has an improvement in sound quality over the ‘A’ side but, let’s face it, the song itself could easily get sand kicked in its face down at the beach.
Style over substance then? Perhaps but balanced against that is that almost unassailable charm. By the way, the red vinyl indicates the third pressing as a black and a gold version went before it.