Much like its namesake war, Vietnam the band was not a good time. Upon my first encounter with this Brooklyn outfit, at an Oct. 2003 CMJ party at Lit, Vietnam were a model of misanthropy: three scraggly dudes with faces obscured by long hair and crazy-homeless-guy beards, dispensing somnambulant Spacemen 3 stoner-blues in slow-acting 10-minute doses, ignoring the audience completely. The only thing to latch onto was Michael Gerner's familiarly Dylanesque spiel, though even at his grumpiest, Bob never demanded that you to "pull your fuckin' cock to prove you're not dead." Given the lethargic delivery, you half-expected Vietnam to heed their own advice and start tugging at their own johnsons.
The guys playing that CMJ show appear on this new, self-titled Vietnam album, but in so many ways, this is not the same band. Singer/guitarist Gerner, guitarist Josh Grubb, and drummer Michael Foss have since filled out the line-up with a bassist (Ivan Berko) and made a bunch of fabulous new friends, including Jenny Lewis (who provides guest vocals) and, most improbably, Maroon 5 bassist Mickey Madden (who co-produced the album with the Beachwood Sparks' Dave Scher). The extra bodies have inspired Vietnam to craft an album of surprisingly lush and tender country-soul hymns that are several degrees warmer and more inviting than the monochromatic dirges of their earlier EP The Concrete Is Always Grayer on the Other Side of the Street. You can easily gauge the before/after effect in the one song that features on both discs, "Apocalypse". Formerly a rambling solo electric-guitar piece, the song is jolted to life with dramatic blasts of brass that goad Gerner into a more sympathetic portrayal of a burnout at the end of his wick; now, when he belts out the chorus line-- "All I wanted was to feel... the heat!"-- it sounds like wish fulfillment.
In their recent Fader cover story, Vietnam claim they began writing this album in a sublet that had suddenly had all its electricity and utilities cut off, which would account not just for the album's nocturnal, intimate nature, but also its air of hard-fought perseverance. If there's still a connection to the Spacemen 3, it's that centerpiece soul ballad "Toby" provides the bittersweet punch line to that band's "taking drugs to make music for people to take drugs to" joke: that is, friends OD and die. And if the album does little to suppress Gerner's hard-on for Dylan, the real commonality isn't so much their voices-- Gerner's is more throaty than nasal-- but in the choice of imagery, with songs about corruption and class disparity populated by nameless characters identified only by their vocation (the priest, the poet, the lawyer, etc).
Enjoyment of Vietnam will hinge on your tolerance of Gerner's gruff croon and stretched-out melody lines-- particularly on late-night-stroll serenades like "Toby" and "Too Tired"-- but where the singer once came off as cranky, he now exudes real charisma: the rousing, freedom-rock chorus of "Gabe" overshadows the blatant cop of the "how many times" lyrical structure of "Blowin' in the Wind"; the red-light grind of "Mr. Goldfinger" is as seductively seedy as the champagne-room exploits that play out in its verses; and in the acoustic Zep-grooved "Summer in the City" (not to be confused with the Lovin' Spoonful song), Vietnam could score themselves the Williamsburg patio-party tune of the coming season. Vietnam always looked like hippies; it's nice to hear them acting like them, too.
