Rich Girls Bring Their Enigmatically Catchy, Allusive Sound to Bowery Electric

by delarue

You either have to be sarcastic, and afraid of nothing, or just plain clueless to call your band Rich Girls these days. Is this New York group a bunch of snobby, entitled Lana Del Rey wannabes – or are they punk, or hip-hop? As it turns out, none of the above. Frontwoman Luisa Black’’s cool, inscrutable vocals and enigmatic, offhanded lyrical metaphors float over a reverbtoned guitar backdrop that’s part new wave and part dreampop. Black’s latest project is a lot more dynamic than her old group, San Francisco dark garage band the Blacks. The new  debut ep Love Is the Dealer is streaming at Bandcamp; the band has a show at Bowery Electric on March 7 at 9:30 PM. Cover is $8

The opening number, New Bag has a hypnotic, insistent, echoey downstroke guitar drive set to a 2/4 new wave pulse: Wire and New Order are the obvious comparisons.

Loaded is the album’s best cut, a steady, twinkling, reverby, noir-tinged number, 60s Orbison pop updated for the teens. Early Sharon Van Etten and Holly Miranda sounded a lot like this; the band follows a steady trajectory upward to an enveloping dreampop vortex

Open Water is a more propulsive take on the post-New Order sound of the ep’s first song..It seems to be about taking a plunge, and the consequences afterward.

Grip has a catchy middle-period Jesus & Mary Chain growl and a far more dynamic singer than that band had. The ep’s final cut is Black Night, an allusive waltz. “White light, head in your hands, you’re alive again,” Black intones “Alive, alive, back from the dead…hold the feeling and not repeat until we run.” Like most of the other songs here, it builds toward a deep-space shimmer not unlike what the Church was doing 25 years ago. If the band does all this onstage, it could be something to get lost in.