After landing earlier this year in a 500-print limited run, Vivian Girls saw their self-titled debut LP sell out in a week’s time. Re-issued some months later, now the rest of the world can find out what the buzz was all about. Being Brooklyn-based certainly helped their chances—that place breeds next-big-thing-bands faster than Courtney Love goes through rehab. But hype is a double-edged sword, and far too many others fail to live up to the fanfare. This trio manages to meet the promise even if they fail to carve themselves out a unique identity. They sound like a lot of bands you already know and love, but they do it well enough that complaints are pretty much impossible.
Vivian Girls attempt the difficult (and not always wise) task of crossing riotous punk with lo-fi shoegaze. The methods are at odds with each other: one is defined by rich energy, the other by minimalistic antipathy. They also join the harmonies of 60s-era girl groups and the dissonant squall of noisy college radio. It’s not often you can find a band that will be liked in equal measures by fans of the Shangri-Las and fans of Jesus and Mary Chain. Indeed, band members Cassie Ramone, Kickball Katy and Ali Koehler could have just as easily fit in with Sleater-Kinney as they would have with the Ronettes.
The songs themselves are mostly quick-clipped little demons; over before you know it but with enough aftertaste to remember. Vivian Girls don’t try to gum up the works with sonic screwballs and left field variations. If you like one song, you’ll probably like them all. The way they fashion noisy pop songs is reminiscent of Tiger Trap and the Vaselines, but they do so with as little precision as possible. The hooks almost sound accidental. Because most tracks end before two minutes are even up, they refuse to exhaust the possibilities. But because of the tuneful vocalizing roiling along with the atonal fuzz, we can ascertain that Vivian Girls aren’t sloppy, just aggressive.
Flying by at a brisk twenty-one minutes, Vivian Girls is probably the quickest LP since Minor Threat first landed. Brevity is one of the band’s greatest allies. Forty minutes to an hour of this sort of thing would have been a drag no matter how great the tunes are. But for all the brief quickies contained within, the album hits its peak at the middle, with back-to-back tracks crossing the three-minute threshold. “Tell the World” and “Where Do You Run To” are both about lovelorn infatuation, but the former is more direct and confrontational while the latter emphasizes the gauzy melody and becomes almost distant and dream-like.
Elsewhere, they flatten us with startlingly immediate rockers like “Such a Joke” and “Never See Me Again.” The latter, in particular, is propelled by the percussion, usually a second-tier interest in bands obsessed with treble and distortion. Meanwhile, the jittery “Tell the World” has a potent kick drum grabber. The bass and cymbal crashes also ignite “No,” a song that is all emotion without baggage (the lyrics of which are simply the title repeated again and again). And closer “I Believe in Nothing” may very well support nihilism, but like “No,” the lyrics are all about mood and melody—what the three of them say is far less important than how.
Though they break no new ground, Vivian Girls don’t seem to be ambitious enough to want anything different. Tearing through ten songs in as little time as the average sitcom rolls by sans commercials makes them sound both take-no-prisoners and take-no-chances. Damaged and debonair, they reverb the hell out of each pristine melody, blanketing beautiful harmonies with enough thorns to give them a dangerous edge. It’s as hard to pin down this young band as it is to properly evaluate their future. Will they hammer out more of these fast and fuzzy shorties or do they dip their toes into murkier/clearer waters? Until then, we have Vivian Girls, a comfortably tidy little gem worth checking out.
"Vivian Girls" is on sale September 30, 2008 from In the Red.
