Seeing The Vivian Girls live is reminiscent of times past and possibly present/future, involving putting Dreamboat Annie by Heart on repeat, building a fort out of duvets and crawling inside to dreamily pine and suffer oneself for another lost loser love with a stupid haircut.
Sigh.
What a dreamboat.
They’re the sort of band that Daria - remember that show? The dry, deadpan, apathetic MTV generation’s answer to Bart fucking Simpson - would have creamed over.
Yes, the lyrics are for the most part like diary entries bemoaning the activities of mean, emotionally vapid young men and the shit dealt hand of being bloody female, but they’re delivered with a dreamscape cadence that makes it sound more like an echoing reminiscence than an actual present, immediate suffering.
And so it is that The Vivian Girls performance tonight comes with a veneer of teenage nostalgia -of having friends rally around you with a bottle of MD 20/20 and a Breeders mix tape to make the unbearable bearable.
It’s certainly a sentiment that seems contagious and apparent in the faces of the audience who beam with comforted adulation throughout the set.
TVG have a sweet, intimate presence on stage which is refreshingly bullshit free. Their onstage affectionate chemistry is beautiful and there’s a total deviation from the current trend of female performance which seems to require burying oneself beneath 15 layers of fancy dress apparel and 30 further layers of make up and just being vacantly weird for the bloody sake of it.
Songs Never See Me Again and Can’t Get Over You are supreme examples of their lo-fi, cutting confessional style, delivered with totally straight, near-deadpan vocals and blissfully disenchanted vocal harmonies.
Out For The Sun however showcases their prowess for furious near-prog ecstasy, with guitarist Cassie Ramone supplying jagged solo’s to drummer Ali Koehler’s simplistic but aggressively raw percussive style.
Bassist Kickball Katy really shines for this song though - providing a bass line so sumptuous that it could probably be packaged up and sold in sex shops as an arousal aid. She struts into the audience proudly, backing herself straight into people and grinning wide with total delight.
An Acapella rendition of The Chantels’ He’s Gone is another piece of absolute pure joy, made all the more endearing for their fuck ups - having to re-start the song for having gone out of tune and then having to finish the song early for the same reason - all garnished with a delicious fit of giggles which, frankly, you don’t see enough of at gigs. Especially on a sodding Monday when you well and truly need to witness people publicly fucking up in any way and just laughing it off.
It. Makes. Life. Better.
They’re quite amazing, actually, in their talent to swing between total effectual minimalism and raw, distorted noise. They have a great control live which never sees their vocals get overtly emotional or vulnerable, despite the confessional aspect of their music. Any emotion that was there is fed into distortion, the pound of a drum skin, a harmony, a repeated lyric, an echoed line.
Before I Start To Cry and Tension are perfect examples of TVG’s ability to denote their lyricism through dynamics - terse, low key verses spill into built up choruses and finales, with Before I Start To Cry seeing Katy donning a tambourine for the first part of the song, which is probably the most open we ever see the girls during the performance.
However, TVG do work to a formula which, though perfect for listening to in your bedroom with, say, a pack of smokes and a feuding ex-lover, doesn’t quite hold the attention for the entirety of a live show. Instead the set deteriorates a little while before the final song with similar sentiments and styles blending many songs into an attention deficit strangle that lacks desperately needed energy.
But then again, if TVG are the musical equivalent of Daria Morgendorffer, then a lack of energy is exactly to be expected. And applauded!
Hail apathy!
Maybe this reviewers just a little peeved cos they didn’t play I Believe In Nothing. And the final bus came and went in the time it took to wait for it.
Sigh.
Ah well, time to crawl under the duvet fort and pine and bemoan the exemption of this song from the evening.
What a dreamboat.
Official Site: http://www.freewebs.com/viviangirls/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/viviangirlsnyc
Buy Everything Goes Wrong by the Vivian Girls: http://tinyurl.com/y9a8nte
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