Vivian Girls are a new breed of female rockers

Vivian Girls are the hapless time travelers of indie bands. The trio from Brooklyn, all in their twenties, take the ragged sound of '90s bands (from when they were kids) and blend it with the super-produced pop of '60s girl groups (from when their moms were kids)—it's a mesh between Beat Happening and the Shangri-Las, and it creates some new kind of nostalgic hybrid. Songs from their first, self-titled album such as "Wild Eyes" and "Such a Joke," are vibrant yet lackadaisical like the best old surf rock, propelled forward with slappy drums and washed-out guitars. The standout single "Tell the World," in particular, is an otherworldly trip into Phil Spector's recording studio, so ghostly and creepy that the girls seem to be calling out from the bottom of a well.

Vivian Girls' distinct sound comes from their lo-fi approach. The girls bang on their instruments like they barely know how to play them, and sing old-fashioned three-part harmonies like they're alone in the shower. In interviews, they joke about their awful playing cheerfully. They complain about bands that "shred" too seriously at the expense of catchy songwriting, and make snide girlish comments about going to "music college."

But don’t be seduced by this faux-naïveté. All those genre references are just too spot-on to suggest musicians who don't understand exactly what they're doing. The fuzzy recordings, the echoing distortion and feedback, the muddying of bass and guitar: all serve to make their songs sound just so, a perfect facsimile of a high school garage band recorded on a crappy old four-track. It's an intentional hybrid between sloppiness and perfectionism, the application of meticulous production methods to a dirty bag of tricks.

For women in rock, intentional badness can say some powerful stuff. Take lo-fi queen Liz Phair, whose off-key singing was part of her warts-and-all feminist package in the '90s. Phair's vocal rawness was pointedly tied to her lyrics' confessional rawness. When she sang, she meant something by it: she wasn't going to be pretty for her audience or all those guys she slept with, perfect pitch be damned. (In recent years, Phair has abandoned this approach for the studio magic of Autotune—turns out, pretty girls sell more records.) But it's hard to relate Liz Phair of 1993 and Vivian Girls of 2009. When Vivian Girls sing or play rudely, as they often do, their amateurism doesn't sound like the product of an emotional urge, something that just can't wait to be expressed. They sing bubblegum songs about teen crushes and breakups, which is far more pop than personal. If there's a message there, I'm not sure where to find it.

The band that Vivian Girls recall most is the Shaggs. (The girls, with their thick schoolgirl bangs, even look alike.) The Shaggs are a bit of '60s rock 'n’ roll arcanum, creators of outsider music so unknowingly awful that it's considered brilliant in certain circles. They sang about what they knew (parents, their pet) as best as they knew how (not very). Music critic Lester Bangs, only half-joking in 1981, called the Shaggs' album Philosophy of the World a masterpiece ("How do they sound? Perfect! They can't play a lick!") and said it was proof that rock music's salvation lay in women, who hadn’t yet been ruined by polish and professionalism. Bangs attributed to the Shaggs all manner of “women should rule the world” kinds of qualities: “true one world humanism,” aversion to technology, and “third-world akin closeness with the earth,” whatever that means. He was elaborating, of course, not so much to praise the Shaggs’ as to elevate “authenticity” to the new gold standard for rock.

Tags: Beat Happening, Lester Bangs, Liz Phair, Music, Phil Spector, Shangri-Las, the Shaggs, Vivian Girls

Anna Balkrishna is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.

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