New Music From Girl Groups, Les Filles de Illighadad
Various Artists
Girl Groups – The Underground Versions
(The Blog That Celebrates Itself)
On paper, there may be little common ground between ‘60s girl groups—acts such as The Ronettes, The Shirelles and the Shangri-Las—and contemporary underground D.I.Y. rock/pop acts, since girl groups made manufactured pop according to tried-and-true formulas, often using a strict division of labor such as the one-stop-shopping offered in the famed Brill Building.
But at its best, girl-group pop is infectious and enduring, even when the subject matter is about melodramatic teen romances gone wrong, and many successors, from the Ramones to the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Magnetic Fields, owe debts to this music.
The Brazilian record label The Blog That Celebrates Itself—its name references the early ‘90s London music scene dubbed “The Scene That Celebrates Itself”—began as a blog nine years ago as an enthusiastic champion of underground, international rock/pop, and it has recently released its 16-track cover-album tribute to the ‘60s girl-group era, available as digital downloads.
The relatively obscure bands here are intimately familiar with the aesthetics of “The Scene That Celebrates Itself,” which included shoegaze bands like Moose and Lush, and adopt those styles with a fair amount of wiggle room, into noise-pop or bliss-pop, while remaining generally faithful to the original songs’ structures.
The Fredericksburg, Va. group Ceremony offers perhaps the album’s most abrasive contribution—a cover of “Now You’re Gone” originally by Bobbie Smith and the Dream Girls—with primitive drums and ear-bleeding, prickly guitar fuzz run through a wah-wah pedal.
Also from Fredericksburg is the duo Static Daydream, featuring former Ceremony member Paul Baker and singer/guitarist Jamie Casey, covering the Cookies’ “I Never Dreamed” with gorgeous, dreamy vocals, sounding like something that could feel at home on Slumberland Records.
The Cake’s “Baby, That’s Me,” covered by Lazy Legs, alternates between sweetly delivered verses featuring schoolgirl vocals with deafening blasts of severely distorted guitar chugs, and the album ends with a glorious and majestic rendition of Darlene Love’s “Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry” by the Churchhill Garden from Switzerland.
These are durable songs and melodies that have stood the test of time, so on one hand, it would be pretty hard to mess things up; that said, this writer was pleasantly surprised to discover that there’s nothing half-assed about this D.I.Y. release, which handily surpasses expectations for a low-budget cover album.
Les Filles de Illighadad
Eghass Malan
(Sahelsounds)
It’s hard to believe that in the entire west African nation of Niger, there are only a handful of female guitarists, and among them is Fatou Seidi Ghali of the group Les Filles de Illighadad.
Ghali’s band serves as the intersection between two musical strains—the female-dominated tende, named after a type of drum, and the male-dominated Tuareg guitar music (sometimes called desert blues) that is steadily getting exposure outside Africa.
The group comes from Illighadad, a remote nomadic Saharan commune with no running water or electricity, and Ghali is a self-taught guitarist who surreptitiously borrowed her older brother’s guitar to practice.
Following up last year’s impressive Sahelsounds release is the studio debut Eghass Malan from the all-female Tuareg group, which has expanded to a trio from the duo of Ghali and vocalist Alamnou Akrouni.
Although Eghass Malan is a studio album, its sound is unadorned and natural, without a trace of any distracting studio effects; the arrangements have an elegant simplicity with just a few elements, including handclaps and a struck calabash that delivers a beat to provide a bed for the guitar and vocals.
Ghali proves to be an agile guitarist, and sometimes her vocal melody lines and guitar lines match up, like on “Inssegh Inssegh,” with an astounding precision. On the album’s title track, there’s a trance-inducing minimalism invoked by the performers who gravitate to a central note, occasionally interrupting with spirited outbursts of ululations.
The song “Imigradan” is revisited from the first album, and this version is richer yet just as intimate as the previous one, with gently rolling electric guitar patterns and octave-separated voices.
The closing “Telillite” offers entrancing call and response exchanges and casts a potent spell, allowing minutes to pass away blissfully and bathing the listener with its tight, circular motions and restless, insistent flow.