There's almost no gray area when it comes to Vivian Girls-- people either love or hate this band. For all of us who fell for their 2008 debut, there were just as many others who cried foul. Boy, did they cry. "The singing is flat!" "I heard this in the 80s when it was better!" And, of course, that most classic of put-downs: "They can't even play their instruments!" Such criticisms miss the point. We are talking about punk music, after all, and since when did studied musicianship become a prerequisite there? And frankly these are the same folks who will tell you that a band like Dirty Projectors is too pointillist, too proggy, too musical, so apparently there's a golden medium somewhere that I'm unaware of. So let's focus on the important stuff: Is this band doing something interesting? Do their songs sound good?
On last year's Vivian Girls, the answer to those questions was a simple yes. Tell me "Where Do You Run To" and "Tell the World" aren't great pop tracks and I'll argue you until I'm blue in the face. But, sure, there were probably other factors at play in their success. The timing was ideal, for one. Vivian Girls arrived at the onset of the lo-fi resurgence-- a point when hazy guitar pop wasn't quite so, um, prominent, and when the mention of "shitgaze" would elicit an eyebrow raise instead of an eye roll. A year and what feels like hundreds of scuzzy records later, the band faces a thorny task with their sophomore LP, Everything Goes Wrong. Lo-fi fatigue has officially set in for many listeners, and fair or not, it feels like the band has to fight off a backlash not only against themselves but also against the genre they represent.
That's a lot of pressure to put on a group that seems principally interested in playing quick-and-dirty punk rock songs about things like boys and love and loneliness. And Everything Goes Wrong generally falls in line with those simple goals. It's not a record that aims for the rafters or seeks to win over the band's haters and fence sitters. (Much less prove the worth of the whole lo-fi movement, if such a thing exists.) In fact, it's so straightforward and largely enjoyable that it kind of sidesteps the whole notion of the anticipated follow-up all together.
Indeed, Everything Goes Wrong almost feels more like a third record than a second. There are no dramatic missteps, no weird forays into krautrock, just a batch of mostly solid rock cuts. But there are notable differences between this album and its predecessor. Part of what made Vivian Girls so appealing (and ultimately divisive) was its synthesis of influences-- Spector pop, the C86 stuff, shoegaze, it was all in there. But the band was always quick to shrug off those inspirations ("I actually don't like shoegaze at all", drummer Ali Koehler once told me in an interview), and there is markedly less pop-canon pastiche this time around. If they're drawing on any particular genre now it's the thrashy hardcore they grew up on; the sound here is decidedly more aggressive (or at least faster) than before. Ramped-up rpms on "I Have No Fun" and "The Desert" are welcome, and standout "Survival" finds a sweet spot by combining it with sugary melodic verses.
The move away from bubblegum-sticky garage rock towards classically inspired punk works both for and against the band here. On one hand the sound feels more their own, but the subtraction of some those doo-wop hooks, along with the record's darker, more somber tone makes for fewer instantly memorable moments. The band finds eventually finds its comfort zone, though. They do so on "Double Vision", a four-minute (!) jangle-pop cut that ends in a lovely group-sung coda, and "The End", the song that most closely resembles 80s blues-punk greats Gun Club, whose inspiration, if not purposefully sought after, looms large on the record. But Everything Goes Wrong's best track is also its strangest: "Tension" is Vivian Girls gone art-punk, and with its spiky choruses yanked from dirge-y tar pit sludge, it feels somehow like a Wire song covered in muck (a compliment, of course).
And that's the funny thing about this album: It's weirdly kind of a grower. There's nothing that immediately jumps out and announces itself as the "Where Do You Run" of Everything Goes Wrong. Some of that has to do with the gloomier vibe of the record; its pleasures are less upfront, sneakier in a way. But under the radar is a good look for Vivian Girls in 2009, and hopefully it adds a bit more nuance to the discussion surrounding them.
