Girls In The Eighties is the solo (now full band) project of 25-year-old Chase Reynolds. He started the band in 2001, but it ended in 2004. Years went by, and it sounds like they weren’t good years. In Reynolds’ words: “At the beginning of 2008, I tried to kill myself. Then I tripped ’shrooms and completely changed my life around. I decided that I wasn’t going to be a worker bee the rest of my life.” Mushrooms will do that.
Musically, Nashville’s Girls In The Eighties are a total joy: Short, keyboard-dusted songs with lo-fi noisiness, where appropriate. It’s hard to hear exactly what Reynolds is singing, but the lyrics sheet hints at rougher days, full of nightmares and yearning for disconnection. “Teenage Royalty” is steeped in keyboard blips and churning rhythm, and it’s the best of his Reynolds’s older songs. “Burn Your Riches” seems like a nice transition toward his newer, more structured tracks. Of the new batch, “Yesterdays Don’t Mean Shit,” benefits from both the expanded lineup and the crowd of friends he got to sing along, and album opener “Vacation” is stuffed with hooks, finding, as does the rest of the album, a sweet, sloppy zone between No Age and (good) Weezer.
Reynolds began writing and recording the songs on Teenage Royalty in 2008, then released it via Deerhunter message board in 2009. It made it onto a self-released CD January of this year. Between then and now, Reynolds recruited his roommate and a keyboard-playing friend to record Faceless Sonic Boom, which will be out in a couple weeks. He says they haven’t played many shows yet because they can’t afford to, but here’s hoping.