Review for For All the Girls' self-titled debut album.
"Damien Fairchild writes love songs for the girls he's been in love with or has loved at one point in time. He released his first 14 song album on his 14th birthday. Feb 14th, 2012."
If those bands assumed alter-egos to justify the whimsical idiosyncrasies of their musical projects, Danburry's Fairchild alter-ego likewise allows him to explore an unconventional songwriting mode. The 14 tracks on For All the Girls are each written for a different girl (whose name is the title), and each approaches love (or love lost) from a perspective of adolescent innocence. The tracks are mostly very short — 11 of the 14 are under 2:00 long — and many of them have quite simple lyrics.
For instance, the song Maryann has few lyrics but the refrain, which goes "Maryann, Maryann, why'd you break my heart in two." Or take the chorus of Nikole, which goes "Oh, you're awesome, oh I love you." Without the conceit of the Fairchild character, this kind of songwriting might come off like when Weezer's Rivers Cuomo tries to channel his inner teen and ends up with vapid songs like, well, almost everything on Raditude. Danburry's sometimes unsophisticated lyrics, on the other hand, embrace a kind of guileless minimalism. Occasionally, this can leave the lyrics sounding trite or cliche, but more often Danburry rises to a level of pithy profundity.
My favorite of the songs, "Kimberly" (embedded above) hinges on the hook "Oh my darlin' Kimberly take me back." The "give me one more chance to prove myself" trope is well-trodden in pop love songs, but somehow, giving the song a middle-schooler narrator breathes new life into a stock idea. Do you remember how nebulous and daunting crushes were as a young adolescent? These songs ask us to forget about how naive we all were at that age and remember the experience of how enormous the idea love seemed, how the first spark of a romance utterly consumed the world, how unrequited love could crush everything. In a sense, these are love songs at their most raw. Danburry's songwriting embodies the innocence and naivete of young love in all its burning earnestness.
Musically, the album is incredible, drawing from an eclectic range of influences. This is breezy indie pop songwriting with multipart vocal harmonies, rich arrangements, and gorgeous lo-fi production. Stylistically, I would place For All the Girls in the same bin as contemporary indie artists such as Eels, A.C. Newman, The Apples in Stereo, The Magnetic Fields, The Delta Spirit, Coconut Records, Benji Hughes, Nick Diamonds, and Electric President. And like many of the bands I've just mentioned, For All the Girls is heavily indebted to classic 60s pop.
Danburry says that he came up with the Damien Fairchild character to experiment with writing music as a method actor. He wanted to free himself from expectations in order to enjoy making music again. A listener can similarly benefit from an attempt to push away their own expectations. Despite my attempts to identify similar artists, this album really doesn't fit into a neat generic box, and it's a blast to just listen to the music on its own terms. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Run, don't walk, to itunes or cdbaby to pick up this record. The album can also be streamed on its YouTube Channel.
