Giant And The Georges – Don’t You Know?
The cycle of nostalgia turns anew on Giant and the George’s latest EP Don’t You Know? – A brief and breezy four-track affair indebted to the carefree indie-rock heyday of the late 90s and early 2000s.
The title track sets the EP in motion with loose and playful strumming that recalls The New Radicals. Promotional photos have the band in unbuttoned Oxfords and Beetlejuice Trousers, but I am convinced that there’s a pair of baggy khakis and a bucket hat somewhere in the back of their wardrobe. In any case, the song bounces along with the help of an insistent electric guitar line and some smart vocal harmonies on the hook. The lyrics follow the time-honoured indie tradition that can best be described as Extroverted Solipsism. ‘Sometimes I feel the world’s not real’ runs the verse, delivered with a yearning that seems to contradict the cynicism of the words themselves. The hook changes to ‘now I know’ for the final runaround, but the question at the song’s heart remains intriguingly unanswered.
Duck Egg Blue begins with a Feeder-ish bassline and initially deals with loneliness and the absence of mundane moments of intimacy. So far so good, but the second verse veers off course and into the wildly strange line, ‘I’m straight and everyone is gay.’ This isn’t just a throwaway lyric – the guitars fade into silence, leaving only the bass and a single high-hat beat, and the word ‘gay’ is stretched to accommodate five additional syllables. Make no mistake, this is a spotlight moment both for the voice and for the writing, and it lands with a terrible clunk. If it is a metaphor, then it’s a shockingly self-centred one. And if it isn’t a metaphor then it’s weirdly out-of-kilter with the rest of the song’s narrative. Either way, it’s a strange and sour choice for the second verse of an otherwise jangly indie-pop love song.
The EP closes with Mexico and Sunflower Girl, and it is here that Giant and the Georges’ points of influence start to get meta. Mexico sounds like Stereophonics doing their best Rod Stewart impersonation. Sunflower Girl cribs from Jet cribbing from The Beatles. There’s unmistakable sense of a band searching for an authentic identity – smashing bits and pieces of familiar sounds together and trying to make them make sense. ‘I’ve never been to California, I sure know the road’ goes the verse in Mexico – possibly the EP’s most revealing lyric, set as it is against guitars that carry all the self-conscious sleaze and swagger of Americana. There is hope, however, as the verse of Sunflower Girl reveals. Despite its derivative sound, it is Giant and the Georges’ most authentic moment of longing, made all the more acute by the line ‘she’s got hair as red as orange juice and a taxidermy squirrel.’ Don’t You Know EP reveals a band taking their first tentative step into weirdness, with the other foot planted squarely in the sounds of safe, familiar indie rock. Take the second step, Giant. And take The Georges with you.
Christopher R. Moore
