Girls In Hawaii – Everest

I would like to impart upon you a mere approximation of the main impression the good people of Hawaii left upon me: their mellifluous accents lilt in such a way as to play perfectly off of the sounds of breakers rhythmically beating against black sand, and possess a soothing quality – this applies to all the voices with the aforementioned accent, really – most appropriately used at the end of a thousand mile flight above the gaping maw of the world we call the Pacific Ocean.

There, that accent is the first thing to welcome us, the Xanax Flyers, whose nerves are inevitably left raw and shattered by the mental gymnastics necessary to not freak out mid-flight upon the realization that it is you and this pleasingly fuchsia festooned tin can winging about at an ungodly rate of speed, which, if something were to go wrong, is being travelled at an ungodly distance from an inhospitable landing site an ungodly distance from any semblance of hope or civilization, so that if one should by chance survive, your life would be reduced to a few days of clinging to seat cushion life preservers and gazing out across the sea for the tell-tale glimmer of floating bags of pretzels or peanuts. One has so much fucking time to think about these things, on a flight to Hawaii, and with that paradise outside your window and that anxious hell-scape inside your head battling savagely to colour your perceptions when the wheels hit the ground at HNL, that voice, the voice of the people of Hawaii, is the thing that tips the scale inevitably in Eden’s favor.

All of this gets mentioned because, upon the completion of Everest, the only thing running through my mind is Girls In Hawaii’s namesake.

The lazy-yet-unavoidable Phoenix comparisons could be made, but they are really only appropriate in the album’s best moments; what we have, here, is something innocuous and effervescent, with the pretty, whimsical coating and transient nature of a Garcia Y Vega canelo cigarillo – it should be noted, in the interest of full disclosure, the laziness of this comparison too, what with the smoke of one still on my tongue – that is fine in its moment, gone to nothing in its snuffing.

Which is not to say that Everest is a poor album; on the contrary, it is a rather solid piece of indie pop, a decent addition to Girls’ canon. But it’s an album only memorable in its mild extremes, such as the delightful, Talking Heads-esque weirdness that seeps into the cold, campy drones of ‘Changes Will Be Lost’ or the wooly willy caterpillar low end wiggling its way through ‘Misses.’ The honey dipped, sticky vocals of the eye-rolling-to-the-point-of-proptosis maudlin melodrama ‘Here I Belong’ and the meandering ‘Mallory’s Height’ fall on the opposite side of the abbreviated spectrum, considerably less enjoyable than their brethren.

Really, though, none of it matters, aside from the goth pop sensibility in ‘Rorschach,’ far and way the best cut on Everest, whose plastic drum pad stomp and black velvet opulence calls to mind Depeche Mode. Everything else sans the above deviations, beneficial or baleful, is fine, everything is alright, and while that is certainly not a bad thing for an album to be, one channelling even a fraction of the interest contained in ‘Rorschach’ would most likely not begin its review with such an indulgent digression from the reviewer.