Two Nice Girls Add Up to Four in Local Debut

Two Nice Girls is really four women confident of their own musical identity. From Austin, Tex., the quartet made its local debut Thursday at Highways, the Santa Monica performance art space. The Girls have managed to absorb and update the intent of “women’s music,” on the one hand acknowledging--and appealing to--a sense of feminine community, self-awareness and bonding, while at the same time applying these ethics to a contemporary garage-rock stance that’s about as far from Holly Near or Cris Williamson as you can get.

Gretchen Phillips may write about lesbian love affairs, but songs like “Goons” go beyond functioning as rallying cries for gender-specific issues. Rich with three-part harmonies and silvery guitar lines, the emotional resonance of Phillips’ music is universal, which--in a way--makes it even more radical in its implications.

Phillips’ lyrics sometimes tend toward the simplistic and blunt: an opening acoustic number compared the Bush Administration to kinder and gentler sex, while gay/straight relationships were broadly lampooned in “I Spent My Last $10 (on Birth Control & Beer).” But even at its most satirical, Two Nice Girls never descended into cheap or shrill cynicism.

Possessing a sure sense of their own eclecticism, the band (which also includes Kathy Korniloff, Meg Henges and drummer Pam Bargar) switched guitars, basses and keyboards as easily as it moved from plaintive, folksy harmonizing to a grinding version of surf standard “Miserlou.”

But the group’s finest moment is a medley of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” and Joan Armatrading’s “Love & Affection.” An offbeat but very compatible blend of romantic yearning and street-wise observation that’s far more compelling than the Cowboy Junkies current remake of “Jane,” it was simple, heartfelt and transcendent. Nice stuff.