Forgiveness
Album by Girlpool
Released 29 April 2022
Indie Pop
Label – Anti-
Rating – 5/10
Girlpool’s groggy latest.
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The songs of Forgiveness characterise the evolution of Girlpool. The duo’s infancy was postulated by a minimal rock, guitar-bass setup, a premise that drifted through multiple bedroom/slacker interpretations on sophomore album Powerplant. But Harmony Tividad and Avery Tucker are likely to view those days as either passe or dead, favouring plasticity since 2019’s What Chaos Is Imaginary.
Such softness is depicted by the correlation of losing innocence and painfully inflecting false maturity – it’s that modern indie pseudo-maturity, departing whatever garage-y grit that once was. Forgiveness does not boast a high I.Q; Lie Love Lullaby is the song that chiefly addresses themes of innocence compromised, optimistically listing industrial-style instrumentations on its packaging, ultimately manifesting a stiffness that would rather bow to the tropes of the level-headed indie album.
This is indie pop fly paper; using a trap to attract other traps. Guitars are only adopted as a bulbous badge of honour for the foreground to wear, screaming “we’re still a rock band” enough to cloak Tividad’s coming-of-age outpours on Dragging My Life Into a Dream. They’re a little more sincere on Faultline, but much like the choral stanzas of Light Up Later, the song becomes draped in the form of reverb stereotypical to Girlpool’s contemporaries, tossed like a cloak rather than approached with care.
Utilisation of synthesisers provides another pitfall, often applied leanly as flashes sweep into Butterfly Bulletholes like shoehorned colour. Only sporadically are they applied with identity in mind; opener Nothing Gives Me Pleasure is far more like a Katie Dey song, including the glitching vocal effects and that one line about a finger in an ass, while Country Star and Afterlife get a little crazier, using whatever synthetic technology they can get their hands on to create hellscapes.
Buddying up to the alternative rock bands that influenced Girlpool accomplishes modest feats. Leaving timely tropes in the rear-view, See Me Now prefers doo-wop style chord progressions, while Violet tucks and untucks itself from fuzzed-out ‘90s rock in a manner that resembles Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees – similar kind of crescendo/solo section too.
But the tropes take over, though the worst enemy of Forgiveness is simply its grogginess. Sweeping its energy out the door, Girlpool’s current path is akin to the garage-snubbing sobriety of Foals, coupled with the thought that these songs don’t seem like the moods of individuals.
Best track – Violet.
Rating – 5 out of 10
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