Everything Goes Just Wrong Enough

I liked Vivian Girls initially, but as soon as they became the most
argued-over indie-rock proposition this side of, I dunno, Vampire
Weekend, I tuned out—couldn’t hear them through the noise. And I
don’t mean their staticky guitars, either (duh).

Vivian Girls get argued about as reflexively as any band in action
right now, and while no band is the sum of its discourse, so much of it
swirled around Vivian Girls that it’s hard not to trip over despite
your best efforts. Are they “real” punk or lo-fi or whatever? My
reflexive answer to “Are they ‘real’ anything” questions is “Who the
hell cares?” But excepting objects of fiery passion, those sorts of
discussions get tired in a serious hurry, and in a world full of more
great records than I’ll ever even get to hear, wasting excess mental
energy on a merely okay one is a fast ticket to Crankville.

Besides, I prefer Everything Goes Wrong, the group’s new
album, out September 8 on In the Red, to last year’s Vivian
Girls. Both albums are full of hazy, swarming guitars and buzzing
high-harmony vocals that refract ’60s-girl-group lovelorn lyrics (the
highlights of Wrong are the rueful “Can’t Get Over You” and
“When I’m Gone”) through a more-basic-than-basic ramalama instrumental
approach. But Wrong is a more solid object in every way: longer
(36 minutes rather than 21-and-a-half), heftier sounding, and a good
deal tighter, fuller, and more confident than the debut. I don’t
necessarily expect it to quell all of their detractors—I’ve got
trustworthy friends who claim Vivian Girls were the worst live band
they’ve ever seen. But Everything Goes Wrong is clearly the
product of three women who’ve been on the road a lot and have gotten
inevitably better as a result.

Of course, a lot of people like Vivian Girls precisely
because it’s not tight or full or sharp: Its charm is that it
frequently teeters on the verge of collapse. This is hardly new in
indie rock (you wouldn’t exactly call Pavement rigid), but the
band’s image as Early-Twentysomething Women Who Wear Tight Denim and
Have Sloppy Haircuts and Live in Brooklyn, coupled with their
determined amateurism, struck a spark in people, and not always in a
good way. Idolator’s Lucas Jensen put it this way: “Do you think that
the Vivian Girls [would] go anywhere if they [were] from Wisconsin?”
Others were less kind.

All of which seemed like whatever until December, when a video blog
posted a Q&A of the band sitting in a bathtub and discussing social
circles. There are a number of clear signals that they’re joking
around—drummer Ali Koehler starts out by mentioning living in a
“music-community bubble”; bassist/vocalist Kickball Katy picks up with,
“To counter your real answer with another real answer”; they
trash-talk people who meet others by “going to the bar after work with
their coworkers,” as guitarist/vocalist Cassie Ramone tsk-tsks, before
ragging on Applebee’s and T.G.I. Friday’s.

The band issued a retraction: “Irony,” wouldn’t you know it, was the
key word. A friend who likes Vivian Girls more than anyone I know still
winces at the video’s mention: “Can’t we move on from that?” (It’s a
sign how completely insider this whole thing was that someone would
plea to “move on” from something almost no normal person knows about.)
It made the band into poster girls for, as my friend encompassed it,
“clichéd Brooklyn hipster idiots.” People who wish to believe
that the music of the fourth-largest urban area in the U.S. is
homogenous (it isn’t), that “hipster” is a specific type (parameters,
please?), and that lo-fi indie rock is insular and full of itself
(well…) had a ready-made, you-insulted-my-family target.

Maybe that’s why I found that interview kind of ballsy; in many
ways, it’s the most resonant thing they’ve done, even more so than
their music. Ill-advised and stupid and insular, absolutely: Irony or
no, they came across as elitist jerks. But it isn’t just because I’m an
elitist jerk (hi, I write my opinions down for a living) that I
understood. (Nor is it that, five years after eating a piece of chicken
there that tasted like water—not chicken-flavored water or watery
chicken, just water—you couldn’t pay me enough to eat at Friday’s
again.)

The clip strikes me as three friends who thought they were being
hugely obvious and that everyone would get their joke, but it
backfired. There’s something very
identity-
construction-in-progress about that. It doesn’t make
anyone punk rock, just young and uncertain but still ambitious enough
to give it a shot and, like anyone who’s trying, hopefully get better
at it with time.