One thing that lovers of music, and art in general, at some point or another eventually come to realize is there is no set formula for creating great art. Worthwhile art can be found in all areas of every medium; every genre of music, every art movement, and all eras of literature have their own classics. Masterpieces come in all shapes and sizes, and while it’s impossible to say what makes great art great, it is the humble belief of this writer that the best art is almost always, at the very least, beautiful.
There is no word better than that to describe Girlpool’s most recent output, Before the World Was Big. At the respective ages of 18 and 19, it is a wonderful thought that Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad have only just begun blossoming into the great artists they’ve shown they can be. The duo’s debut album is a fantastic starting point for what I can only hope will be a long and bountiful career.
Though it is their first full length, in some sense, it feels like a finishing of sorts. Not exactly a culmination – it takes an entire career to build to a final masterpiece – but a rather sort of incredible leap forward with their art, a product of the seeds that were sown on their 2014 self-titled EP. Before the Word Was Big shows a great deal of emotional and musical maturity, a growing out of their adolescent, bratty tendencies.
That’s not to say that the new Girlpool is an “adults-only” album. Rather, it looks back on their youth with the same nostalgia and grace of the childhood sequences that Jim Carrey escapes to in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. Tucker and Tividad express their longing for a more innocent time and a reckoning with the fast-approaching grown-up world with lines like “7:45 in the morning, I’m leaving my house/Trying not to think of all the ways this place has changed” and “I just miss how it felt standing next to you/Wearing matching dresses before the world was big”. The thirty-six second long “Magnifying Glass” brings to mind children’s counting rhymes, emitting a particularly youthful exuberance.
Girlpool’s evocative songwriting works in conjunction with their melody making to produce one of the most profound records to come out in recent years. By working with bare instrumentation – a guitar, a bass, and two voices – Tucker and Tividad communicate emotion with striking simplicity. Their melodies are minimal and pure, endearing without any unnecessary fat. The art of restraint is perfected on showstoppers “Cherry Picking” and “Emily”, as controlled whispers turn to passionate choruses that beg the listener to belt along. A sugary labyrinth of voice is constructed at the end of the title track, an off kilter homage to their salad days with remarkable time signature changes.
Clocking in at just under 25 minutes, Before the World Was Big barely has room for a misstep, of which there are none. Get this album, listen to it, and fall in love with it.