Campfire Girls “P.F.A.M.G.”

I’d hoped for something a little more ambitious this week, maybe another mix, but had to scale down. And anyway, there’s an old song that’s been on my mind a bit lately.

Campfire Girls were my favorite of the bands from the mid-90s L.A. scene who were signed to majors around the time of/in the wake of Weezer’s success. (N.b., there are no girls in the band. You know how that goes.)
They were the first group that really struck me as distinctly post-grunge: they used some of the tools, the dynamics, distrortion and doominess, that were familiar from Seattle/Northwest rock, but seemed to be going for something distinctly different. Maybe it was a specific Angeleno grittiness, the knowledge that ugly things thrive even in the sun.

Don’t have the space or time to go much deeper into the self-inflected tragedy of this group–if yr interested, maybe the most candid and heartbreaking publicity bio ever can be found at ArtistDirect. Unfortunately, even their 00s comeback seems to have fizzled.

All of which is just scene setting, really, because “P.F.A.M.G.” (”Perry Ferrell Ate My Girlfriend,” and he might’ve for all we know) is one of the band’s occasional acoustic excursions, taken from 1995’s Mood Enhancer E.P. Frontman Christian Stone goes all breathy and nicotine-stained over deliberately-paced, ringing strums. Only a couple elements, but this is a case where the spare can expand to feel atmospheric.

There’s a nod to Nirvana’s “Lithium” here or there, but where Cobain’s song sought to recreate some psychotic state of being, Stone is nailing the down-in-the-mouth gray daze that the departure of a crazy woman can leave you in. Really, it’s close to the Platonic form of down-in-the-mouth, almost bordering black comedy as acknowledged by the teeth-grit irony of the “I’m a real go-getter” business.

So you guessed it, this was near the top of my dorm room repeat-button playlist. A decade-plus later, I still feel it.

Mood Enhacer (out of print) at GEMM or Amazon.