Girlpool performing “Crowded Stranger” at Sofar London on June 10th, 2015. SoFar put on more than 10 shows every month in London, with filmed sessions. Girlpool make songs that feel audaciously small, like an eyedropper pointed toward the heavens. The 10 songs on the debut album “Before the World Was Big” not only employ a bare minimum of chords (two, pretty much always) but a minimum of notes. If you’d never held a guitar, or even seen one, you could be gently coached to play “Ideal World”, the album’s opening track, within three minutes of being handed one. The same is true of many others. And yet, Before the World Was Big brims with a mysterious power, a charged and palpable sense of hope and awe. Focusing on the clean bones of the songs only leads you to be astonished by how full they feel. This is music with no corners, no hidden places in the arrangements, and the emotions emerge with gratifying clarity. Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker—who sing occasionally in harmony and occasionally in unison, but always together .To listen to Before the World Was Big is to meet their gaze and feel slightly unnerved and exhilarated. It is a quiet album of uncommon intensity.
Tividad and Tucker formed Girlpool when they were 17 and 18, and they told anyone who asked them at the time that they were drawn to each other for their shared sense of purpose: “We wanted something that was honest and straightforward,” Tucker said. “We both wanted to be super vulnerable…Because of the stripped down nature of our music, if one of us messes up, it’s incredibly noticeable. We’re not trying to hide.” In part, it is this clarity of purpose that resounds from the empty spaces on their debut LP. Their EP was shouted, and in its hardy squall, you could hear two powerful voices honing in on some way they might make a dent in the universe.
The Fat Angel Sings 