HOT OFF THE PRESS (#7) – Vivian Girls & The Music Tapes
by Nick Courtright
It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s time for Nick Courtright’s weekly first glance at music discovered in the last seven days, whether it be just-released, just-leaked, or some long-lost gem that has remained under the radar. Click here for other recent editions of HOT OFF THE PRESS, featuring acts such as Bodies of Water, White Denim, Conor Oberst, The Walkmen, Lackthereof, and Grizzly Bear.
Vivian Girls – Vivian Girls
To be released on CD September 30 by In the Red.
The blogosphere is an odd, isolated place, and sometimes the excitement about an album is so thick and mad and foaming at the mouth that it’s shocking to find out the rest of the world hardly knows what’s going on. But this seems to be the case with Vivian Girls, a band who’s been riding the wave of Internet love and adoration these past few months, yet—perhaps because their limited edition vinyl debut has been sold out since practically the minute it was released—most people haven’t yet caught the fever. All that said, Vivian Girls’ clattering, energetic approach to punky two minute pop-rock is befitting of the web's fawning, and surely soon enough the Brooklyn trio (all women, no less) will be the darlings of a wider populus…even if the album as a whole doesn’t thrill as fabulously as the first couple singles would have you believe.
The brief collection—it clocks in at barely more than twenty minutes—is full of easily interchangeable tunes, and the strengths of any one track are most likely the strengths of any other track. Songs such as “All the Time,” “Tell the World,” “Damaged,” and “No” are all fantastic little pieces of work which stun independently, but are a little murky and indistinguishable when put together. But the song on the album most ready for wide-ranging praise is “Where Do You Run To,” which is not only a chugging, catchy, harmonizing piece of sugar, but also lends the greatest credence to the band name—Vivian Girls are named, of course, after the protagonists from outsider artist and janitor Henry Darger’s posthumously discovered 15,145-page masterwork, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion (yeah!). And if that’s not just about the perfect allusion for a gritty and fun lo-fi trio whose album is comprised mostly of songs running less than two minutes, I don’t know what is.
Listen to Vivian Girls here.
The Music Tapes – Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes
Released August 19 on Merge.
Like many who are still mourning the untimely departure from the scene of Neutral Milk Hotel (it’s been ten years!), I always jump at the opportunity to pick up music from anyone even remotely associated with independent music’s most missed flash in the pan. So when it was announced that Julian Koster, a man who actually played beside the elusive Jeff Mangum in Neutral Milk Hotel, would be releasing work under The Music Tapes name for the first time in years, it was pretty simple to put this album high on the priority list. But while history is a fine reason for anticipation, what good possibly could come from Koster’s collection, being that he is notoriously obsessed with the singing saw, of all random instruments, that he personally has never released a truly proper LP, and that he’s been working on Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes for nine freaking years?
Well, to start, the album does take a while to get used to. Much of the recording is done on equipment at least sixty years old, Koster’s voice is high and nasally (fitting right in with his Elephant 6 brethren), and his devotion to the singing saw is as pronounced as advertised. But he also uses these strange charms to carve himself an interesting little sound, and on the tracks where he recruits friends to play with him, such as the fantastic “Majesty” and the boisterous “Nimbus Stratus Cirrus,” it sounds like he really has something great going on. But too often, unfortunately, the tracks just seem like Koster screwing around, or tossing on the album whatever random recorded material he could find—and that’s hardly acceptable when a record is nine years in the works. Altogether, though, the few really great tracks here make For Clouds and Tornadoes an intriguing and worthwhile addition to the Neutral Milk Hotel family tree, and this is an album any fan of that hallowed band should be happy to have.
Stream the entire album here.
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