Rose City

We Say...

Review by Kyle Anderson

Of all the pop music instruments, it's the voice that ultimately carries the most weight. Viva Voce know this, as their fifth album Rose City moves and shifts from psychedelic blues and psychocandy fuzz to buzzy Brit-via-Alabama-pop, but it is husband and wife duo Kevin and Anita Robinson and their two haunting, otherwordly, intertwining voices that provide the bedrock upon which Viva Voce is built.

Long a duo, the band doubled its size for the new record, adding Portlanders Evan Railton and Corinna Repp as full-time members. The result spreads outward two ways, as the songs themselves are better fleshed out and more deftly arranged than 2006's Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, and Repp and Railton's bedrock allows the Robinsons to stretch out into hookier, more blissful territory. Album opener "Catch and Release" layers shimmering multi-tracked guitars and British drone-rock bass buzz on top of each other, which allows the Robinsons to harmonize about being a "lost cause" in a croon that splits the difference between psychedelic blues and My Bloody Valentine. For two people from Portland by way of Nashville and Alabama, their instincts are awfully U.K.-centric.

That's fine as long as they're crafting tracks like "Red Letter Day," the album's centerpiece and one of the finest, most haunting tracks of 2009. Mournful guitar licks sneak in and out of the propulsive fuzz while the Robinsons ask, all dead-eyed and cooing, "Don't you think it's time to lay it all on the line?" And just when they've built up a quality gloom, the song ends and makes room for the vaguely country-soul tones of "Good As Gold," proving they haven't necessarily left their Southern roots behind. Rose City features a handful of those shifts and juxtapositions — sometimes too many — but the Robinsons know that their voices can carry them through the group's stylistic hodgepodge.