Vivian Girls, Everything Goes Wrong
Featured Album
Kiss-off cuts set to a pop-punk beat and violent bursts of distortion
The first time Vivian Girls released a full-length, it went out of print in 10 days. While a proper CD pressing dropped the following fall, the damage was already done: thanks to a torrential downpour of buzz — based on less than 30 minutes of music — the Brooklyn-based trio was linked to the so-called "shitgaze" movement, a concerted effort to push everything into the red. Everything except for those harmonies, which can be heard careening across the group's galloping grooves and trebly guitars. Especially on Album No. 2, a collection of kiss-off cuts set to a pop-punk beat and violent bursts of distortion. Not to mention a seared solo or two, as the band lets a handful of tracks breathe long enough to pummel them back into submission. This is especially evident in "Survival," "Tension" and "Out For the Sun," songs that shed the Girls' Wall of Sound tendencies for pure mud-slinging. And since everything is still treated with a ridiculous amount of reverb, you can be sure that those harmonies will echo in your head for days, right alongside some of their noisiest, gnarliest riffs yet.
