Day 408: TV Girl – Death of a Party Girl
I’m still going through a tired phase, so I had to skirt that fine line of finding an album that’s not so mellow that it’ll lull me to sleep and not so upbeat that it’ll be too much right now. The jangly but melancholic indie darlings of TV Girl seemed like the perfect choice to keep me company tonight, I think I maybe listened to an album of theirs back in the day but I haven’t heard their stuff in years.
Album cover courtesy of TV Girl
Despite their name, TV Girl consists of no girls, it was started in 2010 by two guys in San Diego called Brad Petering and Trung Ngo. The pair were friends from high school and started making music together as a casual hobby, mixing lo-fi hip hop beats with their love of ‘60s girl group pop, but they quickly struck gold with their first self-released EP that they put up on Bandcamp. Their biggest hit from the release got taken down, as they’d sampled a bit of Todd Rundgren and were hit with a takedown notice and a request for of 100% of the proceeds of the song plus a $5,000 clearance fee.
Death of a Party Girl was released in 2018 as the group’s third studio album. It features their trademark sampling with lush, heady instrumentation and breathy lyrics about women, relationships and the L.A. party scene, along with some random audio clips like old-school film dialogue and snippets from a radio crime drama series from the 1950s.
This album is kind of a product of its time, it’s got the lyrical hipster detachment that the kids were all doing in the 2010s, coating everything in a thick layer of irony so that you never come off as too earnest. That mixed with the lo-fi dreamy sound creates a strange sense of emptiness to their songs, which I think works well on songs where L.A. and celebrity culture are looked at from the point of view of an L.A. hipster who sees himself as above it all, with lines like “it's a shame, she'd be a queen back in Rhode Island / Now she waits in line with the other sad clichés” – I get the feeling that it’s less a stylistic choice and more art imitating life.
It’s not a bad-sounding album by any means, but because of the content of the lyrics, it’s just not really something I connect with either. The vignettes of people that this album presents end up lacking depth, and while it’s a fine album to listen to that’s mainly carried by the instrumentals, there’s not a single song where it was elevated above just OK for me. To give them a bit of credit, I’d probably like this more if I was younger.
Death of a Party Girl is a perfectly decent 6.5/10, it’s not something I see myself revisiting but I’m sure there’s songs worth listening to in their catalogue.