Christopher Owens
Chrissybaby Forever
TURNSTILE
7/10
Christopher Owens’s Chrissybaby Forever follows 2014’s rather boldly titled A New Testament, but feels closer to Girls’s debut than anything he’s done since. In lieu of the whirring Hammond organ, multiple gospel singers, and Nashville twang from last year’s LP, Owens tightens things up on Forever and showcases some of the heart-on-sleeveless-tee drive that made Girls a fascinating mixture of strange-yet-playful lyrical simplicity and underrated noisy grace. “Another Loser Fuck Up” seems to confront the legacy of his own “Lust for Life” by using the same ragged chords and then turns out to be Owens’s best song since his old band fell apart. His update of ’50s tragic-teen-pop as seen through the mist of love, drugs, and jangling guitars hits a few different guises here—and not all of them are on point—but the range of ideas he presents, all sweetly sincere and then scarily honest, make Chrissybaby Forever as heartfelt as anything Owens has ever recorded.
