Girls & Real Estate @ The Black Cat

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the Real Estate/Girls show Tuesday night at the Black Cat was an extended tribute to The Clean, an open-mic homage to the under-known but influential Kiwi punk band. Hell, the show might have been a two-set-long cover act, the way both bands indulge in heavy chorus pedal and simple chord progressions and fancy-free songs about summer love. You'd certainly be in your right mind to be excited by a show with so much surf-punk. How could Girls go wrong?

Yet the surfing fun times never surfaced in the San Francisco two-piece's set at the Cat. Instead, Christopher Owens and J.R. White played a perfectly morose set -- a sort of surf-gaze version of their infectiously melodic 2009 full length, Album. Only one single, "Lust for Life," seemed to rise to the tempo set by Girls's recording. Every other number dragged. In part, the cool tempo was a feature, not a bug: The band employed a huge snare drum sound, the kind that would be right at home on a spacey dub record. The spare rhythm-and-bass section served the recording well, but more activity might have moved the live versions along.

Owens's voice is the standout feature to Girls, and Girls sounds like Buddy Holly on a West Coast vision quest as a result. At the Black Cat, though, Owens sounded more like Lil' Wayne covering Mazzy Star. He didn't disappoint live, exactly, but the slower, dubbier sound left him straining to support notes that had no business being so long.