GRLwood are the loudest, sweetest, weirdest, most talented, and also did I say sweetest? thing to come out of Louisville. Karen and Rej are so friendly when I was taking photos of them that it was one of those situations where I couldn’t find a spare moment in the conversation to leave the room. Not that I wanted to leave so much as I’d felt the reasonable amount of time for a press person to be backstage had passed. They indulged their southern roots and dug into some fried chicken and greens.
The first show I ever saw at Brooklyn Bowl was way back when Diarrhea Planet was still together (RIP). They had approximately 80 guitarists on stage at once, while GRLwood’s just Karen and Rej on drums and guitar/vox, respectively. But watching GRLwood, I needed my earplugs just as much and I was totally sucked into their performance. There’s really no comparing the two bands for a ton of reasons, but while I’m putting them side-by-side simply because I saw them play on the same stage – GRLwood’s got this much deeper, angrier, existential purposefulness to their cheeky lyrics, and their much more sparse instrumentation leaves them vulnerable to you as an audience that really, cross my heart and hope to die, moves you.
“Get Shot” opens up their LP2 I Sold My Soul To The Devil When I Was 12 with stark literalism. There’s not much you have to interpret to understand it:
Mama said, be nice to sad boys or else get shot
Say yes sir to a cop or you might get shot
Stay inside at night or you might get shot
Be real nice to mad boys or get shot
This is a slight veer left from their first album, Daddy, which they’ve self-declared a sarcastic concept album.
Daddy did have more outright sarcasm in songs like “Bisexual,” but both records are highly likely to spark conversation and to raise questions that you’d likely argue about your relatives about – and that’s their goal. Seeing them rip it up live, just the two of them, shows you how loud their dedication to starting those conversations and supporting their communities really is.
Instead of asking then a bunch of questions, I asked them to doodle over a This or That game while they filled up on their fried chicken and greens before their set.
Listen to them here and follow them here and here. You can also catch them at Alphaville on December 12th
