There's a repeating scene in my house in which one member of the household will ask the other, "Anything you want to do this weekend?" and the asked will respond with something along the lines of, "I dunno. Was there anything you wanted to do?" Ultimately, a weekend itinerary is cobbled together off the cuff, bike rides and drives to Evanston sandwiched around chores and weekend work. It's not a perfect system, but it works okay and leaves room for spontaneous frozen custard runs. In the house of Anita & Kevin Robinson of Portland, Oregon, I imagine the conversation goes more like this:
The couple makes their music a part of their domestic life, recording as a duo in their own abode-- their Big Pink if you like. Their music doesn't really betray their personal relationship to one another in any specific terms, but it definitely has that home-cooked feel that announces its humble origins, even as their third album, The Heat Can Melt Your Brain, enters moodier, more dramatic territory than its predecessors. The Robinsons are nothing if not ambitious, and their songs have blossomed into involved, thoughtfully arranged opuses that easily fold bells, celeste, saw, kazoo and surprisingly complex backing harmonies into their varied sections.
The Heat Can Melt Your Brain opens with "Alive with Pleasure", which sets a crunching burst of frazzled fuzz bass and bowed saw against the airy sing-song melody that Anita swings between weightless and propulsive passages. This all leads up to a nasty guitar outburst-- one of many showcases Anita's supple playing receives throughout the album, from the backward slashes that cut the inky funk of "Business Casual" to the spacey eagletoned interjections on "The Center of the Universe". The latter is one of the album's finest songs, as Kevin's verse vocal echoes over watery organ and thumping drums, building to a strident, majestic chorus. He also manages to squeeze in one of the album's most openly sentimental verses: "The center of my heart is a beautiful girl/ One tear from her face could destroy the world."
Kevin gets the lead on "High Highs", as well, a smoothly funky tune with a simmering, R&B-inflected; chorus, and one of the duo's most adventurous songs to date. That it's wedged between Anita's floating guitar freakout "The Lucky Ones" and the mellotron- and synth-drenched indie rock thump of "Daylight" is a stark illustration of the band's range, which extends even further on closer "They Never Really Wake Up", a gauzy interstellar lounge cut stuffed with wordless vocals and a bass part that Air by all rights should have included on Moon Safari. It's hard to say exactly where Viva Voce ought to be filed, as they've more or less slid out of any one category on The Heat Can Melt Your Brain. This, however, is an asset in my book, and a sign that Viva Voce's conflation of domestic and creative life is working wonderfully.
