Girlpool, a young fem-punk duo who’s gained popularity recently, played a sold out show at Larimer Lounge on Wednesday Oct. 18. Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad gained a quick and easy following when they were only teenage best-friends living in Los Angeles, and their popularity flourished after moving to Philadelphia at the young age of eighteen.
They’ve since returned to their hometown Los Angeles, but in the interim Girlpool toured across the entire United States, playing sets in DIY venues and their friends garages. The duo’s dreamy, sweet and deceptively simple songs access the emotional sphere.
“I just miss how it felt standing next to you/ Wearing matching dresses before the world was big” (Before the World Was Big). These lyrics from their first album are emblematic of their work: sentimental, naive and written like a diary entry. Their first album and EP work only with guitar and bass and their characteristic two-part falsetto harmony.
Girlpool writes from the early, body-conscious days of the IPod classic and “Best/ Friend” necklaces, so personal and self-aware. They’re constantly between the borders of raw, rough and painfully soft, but they’re unwaveringly intimate and honest.
Their set started out with their track “123” off of their newest album “Powerplant.” The album is their first venture into percussion. The album possesses a more mature, fuller sound, and the duo hasn’t departed from collaborative production.
Larimer Lounge saw Girlpool with not only a drummer but a saxophonist too, and the result had the audience in shambles as the waves of gritty emotion hit. Although the two have long commanded their audiences with their sparse instrumentation and harmony, their backing band made for an arresting live performance that won’t soon be forgotten.
Girlpool’s delivery is deadpan, but their lyricism is deeply poetic.The band explores the themes of youth, femininity, unrequited love and existentialism with a didactic ingenuity. The most essential and effective aspect of the band is their harmony which colors their performance like paint.
High-pitched, sometimes wailing, sometimes flat and humorous, sometimes angry and commanding, their voices are astonishingly real and unfiltered in relaying their breadth of emotion.
Dressed in Carhartt jeans and white ribbed tanks, Tucker and Tividad were veterans of the stage. Comfortable and casual in the audience’s eyes, they addressed the crowd like long-time friends.
Their performance was like an inside joke about a painfully embarrassing moment that everyone in the audience was in on. At one point, Tividad dramatically paused, staring into the crowd like a prophet, only to breathlessly whisper “music, music,” only to burst into laughter with Tucker.
After a generous set comprised of both new songs and crowd favorites from their first album “Before the World Was Big,” the duo performed a one song encore of the track “Chinatown.” When the show was over the crowd had undergone a collective transformation.
Filing out of the venue, the audience was eerily quiet, as if everyone was trying to hold on to the sweet sentimental colors of the candid performance before re-entering the world.
