The sheer pace of the modern music scene is a double-edged sword. The good side is that we get to discover and hear bands like New York’s Vivian Girls in little more than a year and a half since they formed. The downside is that, in the rush for novelty, what we end up being given isn’t always the finished product.
Now, this isn’t me making an argument in defence of major-label pop polish, and I’m quite aware that the lo-fi garage/shitgaze scene that has joyously taken Vivian Girls under its wing values production lower than choreography. Heck, it’s an attitude I have sympathies with. But I can’t help but feel that Vivian Girls, as an album, is not all it could have been.
Wait, wait, I can justify that - what you need to bear in mind is that this eponymous album was originally released as a limited vinyl pressing of just five hundred copies, which all sold out in ten days. That’s damn fine going for an underground fuzz-pop band in any country, and it’s easy to hear the magic that sold people on Vivian Girls. But it feels too scrappy, too inconsistent, to be re-released worldwide so soon.
I’ll have infuriated uberhip noiseniks everywhere by saying that, but I’m going to stand my ground. It’s a great demo album: the Vivian Girls sound is fully-formed - a blend of nineties shoegaze and sixties surf with three-part reverb-soaked girl-group vocal harmonies sashaying across the fizzy guitar - but the songs are somewhat hit and miss. There’s an EP of really good stuff here, but it’s padded out with an equal amount of filler.
Maybe I’m just missing the point; the occasional faux naivete of the childlike vocal melodies may be exactly what everyone else finds so persuasive, but to me they’re the weak spot. The choruses are generally good, but the verses are frequently too little-girl-kooky to be believed. Take album opener “All The Time”, for example; I just can’t take the song seriously, it’s either too ironic or not ironic enough. But it’s followed by “Such A Joke”, which is fantastic. Go figure.
Vivian Girls continues this good-cop-bad-cop routine, delivering one or two also-rans before following them up with a track that wins you back over again. And believe me - when it’s good, it’s really really good. “Tell the World” and “Where Do You Run To” prop up the middle section of the album; where most bands usually hide their flab, Vivian Girls have placed their best, with jangling guitar and rattling garage drums underpinning haunting triple-drone vocal lines, like a brief ghost of some sixties radio broadcast from the next reality along… the reality where all the pretty girls are psychedelic surf-zombie rockabilly musicians, probably.
But then “Damaged” takes us back to the twee stuff again, leaning more heavily on the girl-group stylings, and “No” doesn’t have enough pop to balance its cacophony… I mean, an album with dud tracks is hardly a rarity, but it’s not often so obvious that a band have the ability to knock ‘em out of the park that Vivian Girls possess. As such, I wanted to like the album far more than I actually do, and I suspect it might grow on me over time… but as a five song EP, Vivian Girls would have blown a much-needed smoking hole through the middle of the indie pop scene. Selah - maybe the next one will be even better.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: fuzz, garage, indie, noise, pop, punk, shoegaze, surf, Vivian Girls
