The Fat Angel Sings

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Christopher Owen‘s early life is peppered with tales at least as crazy as this: a childhood spent in the notorious Children Of God cult; a period living in Texas under the tutelage of an eccentric millionaire benefactor; an immersion in the Texan punk scene (and its affiliated drugs); a spell in Ariel Pink’s band Holy Shit. Yet unlike all those stories, the gunpoint robbery was an experience that found its way on to Owens’s debut solo album, Lysandre. Clocking in at just over 28 minutes, Lysandre tells the story of Owens’s first tour with Girls, from flying to New York City for a show to falling in love with a girl at a festival in France. Songs about touring with a rock’n’roll band are normally alienating, depressing affairs (from the Arctic Monkeys’ Despair In The Departure Lounge to most of the Streets’ third album) yet Owens makes it sound just like you imagine it should be: a beautiful, bohemian experience. Even the aforementioned gunpoint robbery is only there to contrast with Owens’s joy at turning his life around and being up onstage playing songs. “I made a conscious decision to capture all the feelings and emotions when it was still fresh and exciting,”
Of course, this does beg the question of why life in Girls soured so quickly. The band emerged in 2009 armed with tales of chemical excess and an album (called simply Album) of hippy-dippy anthems for young, lost and narcotically frazzled kids. The follow-up – 2011’s Father, Son, Holy Ghost – was a tuneful yet gloriously unfocused affair that, rather than turn people away, only seemed to cement their cult status. Unlike so many other indie rock bands of their time, Girls seemed like the real deal: unhinged fuck-ups making open-hearted music in a world stuffed with public-school bores looking for something to do with their gap year. Yet, just three years after the tour which Owens describes with such elation on Lysandre, they’d split up.