That nondescript moniker hasn't stopped the San Francisco duo of Christopher Owens and J.R. White from reaching their audience, who turned out for a sold-out show Wednesday night at Kung Fu Necktie. As the Phillies' repeat hopes slipped away in the background, Owens' forlorn croak wafted through the room on a wave of echoing fuzz, the sound of dreams dissolving in air.

As far as tracking Girls down, it won't help that their first album is titled simply Album. But Owens' personal history is distinctive: Until the age of 16, he was raised in the religious cult then known as the Children of God (now the Family International), which forbade medical intervention and encouraged female members to prostitute themselves to lure recruits. At 16, he ran away and was eventually taken in by the eccentric Texas millionaire Stanley Marsh 3, played guitar in several hard-core bands, and finally turned to songwriting, bashing out Album's 12 songs in a single month.

For all that, Girls' songs are neither angry nor urgent. What you hear is the fragile thread of hope persisting amid the chaos. Simultaneously brisk and woozy, "Lust for Life" mixed the optimistic harmonies of the Beach Boys and the opiate torpor of Spiritualized and Spacemen 3, whose credo of "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" aptly summarizes Owens' description of the recording process.

With his straggly, shoulder-length hair falling haphazardly onto his face, Owens looked as if he might have crawled out of bed shortly before going on stage; given that Girls played fewer than a dozen songs with no encore in spite of the fairly rapturous response, perhaps he was eager to return. He needn't have waited even that long. "Hellhole Ratrace," the set's extended centerpiece, swaddled band and crowd alike in a warm, blissful fog, solid enough for Owens to stand on one leg and wrap the other around the neck of his low-slung guitar. It seemed as if he could have lifted the other leg as well and dozed off in midair, suspended by his own reverie.