Girl and Girl – Call A Doctor
Girl and Girl’s Sub Pop debut, Call A Doctor, feels like a vital, electrifying shock to the senses. An audacious and aggressively tuneful blast of a record; indie-rock that is both intimate and grandiose. The Australian quartet led by Kai James lay a lifetime’s worth of woes – mental health, the human race’s planned obsolescence if you’ve been living on this cursed rock you know what we’re getting at – creates a canvas of indie rock that feels both timeless and in-the-moment.
The album came together quickly, largely recorded in marathon sessions in a two-story industrial complex over the course of two weeks. “That added to the intensity of the album” James says about the frenzied creative process overseen by producer Burke Reid. “I can hear the stress in the record, which is good because that’s what it’s about – being tense, tied up, and in your own head.” Call A Doctor’s eleven songs – spanning sweeping guitar epics and wry acoustic shuffles to spiky punk manoeuvres and the type of raw, adoringly unvarnished indie-pop – are literally plucked from James’ personal history, as he reworked older recordings with newer lyrics reflecting his past struggles as well as new anxieties that emerged prior to the album’s recording.
