Girls tread in an odd area.

On the one hand, the San Francisco outfit veer close to the junkie shtick that Jason Pierce, Pete Doherty, Evan Dando or Anton Newcombe, among others, have worked to the bone.

On the other, one half of the band, principal songwriter, Christopher Owens, (the other half is producer Chet Jr White) was born and raised in the Children of God cult, running away at sixteen. So this seems a good reason to view the world a little askew compared to, say, The Kooks.

It is the tension between what sounds like a genuine, wide-eyed naïvety and the swampier ground from which the druggy take on bubblegum, surf and shoegaze coalesces gives Album a lot of its interest.

While there may be a limit to how much interest being fucked up can lend to a song, but Girls’ otherworldly manhandling of what might easily descend into a pure pop sugar-rush is a stoned delight.

Richard Davie