Review Summary: Just what you expected from Vivian Girls. Only worse.
Many of the internet music scene's denizens seem to have a certain resentment for the so-called "hipster" culture that seems to plague so many of our listeners today. The caricature for these "hipsters" is that, completely disregarding overall quality, they judge a band or album's merits on how "mainstream" it is. In other words, a hipster wouldn't be caught dead enjoying The Black Eyed Peas or Lady GaGa, but would rather pretend to enjoy widely detested acts such as Wavves or, you guessed it, Vivian Girls. To deduct that the all-female noise pop group is strictly a "hipster" band would be slightly unfair; in many ways, they are influenced by old-fashioned groups such as The Go-Go's as much as they are contemporary acts like No Age. And, while admittedly banal and redundant, their 2008 self-titled debut had just enough musical rewards to keep the listener interested; notably, the endearingly lumbering "Where Do You Run To," in which the girls struck it rich with their characteristically simple yet effective vocal harmonies and noisy melodies. So, with a formula that had varying successes the first time around, where does this leave the girls? Not in a good spot, I'm afraid: their second album
Everything Goes Wrong is an utterly monotonous listen with only a few bright spots in between the indistinguishable noisy ditties.
The album starts exactly how you expect it would, with a fuzzy guitar being complemented by drums and the completely standard singing of Cassie Ramone, the main singer and guitarist. The song name isn't worth mentioning because as soon as the second song kicks in the whole thing already feels all too familiar. And there lies the problem with
Everything Goes Wrong: almost every song follows the same pattern, ending in a monotonous and simply boring listen, and only occasionally do Vivian Girls show interest in switching it up. "Tension" slows down significantly and lets the band's biggest asset shine through: their superb vocal harmonies. Predictably, the reward comes with a price: the stereotypically bad production gives the song an ill-fitted and murky sound, sounding cheap and unprofessional, rather than having any kind of positive emotional effect that "lo-fi" production is known to have.
Other than that, though, just about every song sounds the same. And there are 13 of them (three more than the debut, which may explain why that album was somewhat more tolerable). Really,
Everything Goes Wrong isn't as much a bad album as one that just seems like the product of being bored with your own music. The album could have been enjoyable, if not brilliant, but Vivian Girls seem content with slipping by safely instead of reaching for something higher, which isn't what good music should be about.
