You Oughta Know: Little Girls

Posted on Oct 30th 2009 4:30PM by Daniel Sylvester
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Just months into his 20s, Toronto musician Josh McIntyre steps off the stage at Detroit's steamy, seamy Magic Stick to the sound of applause from an enthusiastic and mystified crowd. On a North American tour supporting Vancouver's Japandroids, McIntyre has been debuting material from 'Concepts,' his first album under his Google-mystifying moniker Little Girls, a purposefully anonymous name originally chosen so he could post his music online and get unbiased opinions.

But well before the songs that would appear on 'Concepts' were even laid to tape, Little Girls began enjoying considerable blog buzz, resulting in a record deal with Toronto indie Paper Bag Records, known for releasing pre-fame records by the likes of Stars, Tokyo Police Club and Broken Social Scene (the latter's classic 'You Forgot It in People' was the label's inaugural release).

While playing drums for the fuzzed-out, lo-fi duo Pirate/Rock, McIntyre began recording his own solo material. "I would come home and be bored and I would want to record something but I obviously couldn't record Pirate/Rock without [guitarist/vocalist Joe Roth] being there," McIntyre tells Spinner. "I only had access to pretty bad recording equipment but it still did the job in the long run.

McIntyre's late-night, four-track sessions produced the dirty-sounding songs that would make up the majority of 'Concepts,' a mix of genres like shoegaze and Balearic beats. Lead-off single 'Youth Tunes' is a lo-fi masterpiece, adorned with a single-string guitar lead, anemic drum machine beats and waves of heavily distorted, indecipherable vocals.

Featuring the same sort of shapeless melody that helped define early-'90s indie rock, songs like 'Tambourine' and 'Salt Swimmers' leave songs like Dinosaur Jr.'s 'Little Fury Things' or Sonic Youth's 'Candle' sounding high-concept in comparison.

Winding up the year on the road with label-mates You Say Party! We Say Die!, Mcintyre defends against those who might dismiss Little Girls as the next indie media darlings.

"It happened at the snap of a finger but I've been playing music for quite a long time with different bands so I don't necessarily feel like it was undeserved, I just feel that I definitely got lucky by the way it started."