Atypical Girls

IF YOU KNOW one thing about Brooklyn’s The Girls At Dawn, which you might not, it’s probably that they sound like Vivian Girls.They’ve heard that, too. “Even my friend from Chicago, who I hadn’t seen in a while, was like, ‘Oh, your band, I hear they’re like Vivian Girls,’” says Ana Economou, the band’s bassist. She looks down in mock sheepishness and exasperation as she finishes her story. “I was like, ‘OK.’ I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t really hear it,” chimes in drummer Sarah Baldwin.

“I guess it’s like, our haircuts look kind of similar? And we’re both from Brooklyn,” finishes Ana.

Given the sexism and laziness of rock critics and bloggers, Ana’s probably right on with that line of logic. Faced with more than one group of girls making melodic lo-fi music, the easiest thing to do is to just say they sound the same and move on to posting Neon Indian videos with a clear conscience.

The truth, like always, is a bit more complicated.The Girls At Dawn, made up of Economou, Baldwin and Erin Campbell, draw influence from everything from The Vibrators to girl groups, tribal music and what Ana likes to call “bummer psyche.”The group then runs it all through an extremely lo-fi aesthetic with minimal instrumentation;The Girls At Dawn make music that’s more echoey and weird than anything that other group of girls has ever done. It’s also more vulnerable, with lyrics mostly about loneliness and despair. Sonically, the girls’ delicate vocals are locked in a perpetual death match with the random chaos of their music, and they seem to be losing. It’s honestly a little unsettling.

Part of the cacophonous sound is due to situation: Erin plays guitar and enlisted Ana to play bass, even though she’s mostly a drummer.They found Sarah through a mutual friend and put her behind the drum kit, even though she’s mostly a bassist (maybe in part because she’s about a foot taller than everyone else in the band?).The result is some girls who are, as Sarah says, “not totally together,” but in a way that’s intentionally messy and punk and decidedly DIY.

Part of it, too, just comes down to technology.The band started off as a few friends recording tracks on GarageBand in their bedrooms, pillows stuffed under the drum kit so the neighbors would stop banging on the ceiling. In short, they didn’t really know what they were doing, and they didn’t care. “If anyone has anything bad to say about our recordings,” says Ana, “it’s probably true.”

“Before, we used to just get drunk and record something once and be like, ‘Yeah!’” explains Sarah. “Now, we’re a lot more... what’s the word? Nitpicky.”

“We’re so nitpicky,” agrees Ana. Not that this means the band’s going to lose that weirdness. Ana, who comes to our interview with a dyed-black bob, whitepainted nails and a shirt with red lightning bolts covering some truly impressive skull tattoos on her shoulder, seems to be perpetually dissatisfied, a trait she shares with most good artists. During our talk, she was constantly gazing out the window, becoming too self-conscious to finish her own thoughts and talking about how she wished the band sounded, that is, when she could stop talking about how dumb her poetry is.

“Sometimes I get bummed out, because I want to be a bunch of other things,” she says. “Like, I saw this old documentary on Chicago punk, and I was like, ‘God! I wish we were freaky and weird,’ and then I listen to Roky Erickson, and I’m like, ‘I wish I could scream like him!’ but I sound stupid.”

Never being satisfied with where you are in life is great when it pushes you to do more, but it sucks if it makes you quit in frustration.

There’s little danger of this for the Girls.

The band’s in the thick of recording a fulllength, set to be released later this year on a label the girls can’t disclose at the moment, although they assure me it’s with a label New York Press readers “would totally have heard of.”Then, it’s off on a big tour, which came about through a mix of serendipity, ballsiness and the kindness of others.

In closing, Ana has another word for people who want to dismiss The Girls At Dawn as just another band doing girl-group harmonies. “Yeah, we totally rip off old girlgroup songs, but we also write new music, too, and you can’t just write it off as girlgroup stuff. Like, we’re also a band, and not just a bunch of girls.”

> The Girls at Dawn

Feb. 10, Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Essex & Ludlow Sts.), 212-260-4600; 6:30, $10. Also Feb. 11 at Don Pedro’s.

Girls at Dawn... probably at night.