Vivian Girls

The Vivian Girls are a garage-rock, lo-fi sort of pop-punk girl-harmony outfit from Brooklyn. They appear generic at first - aggressively generic. Their self-titled album, released in 2008, works using a similar aesthetic logic to Henry Darger, the outsider artist after whose virtuous hermaphroditic preteens they named themselves. Clocking in at just over 20 minutes long, the album, in the most tried-and-true chord progressions and song structures and instruments and lyrics and all, follows the archetypal narrative of any pop album: a love affair. Like Darger drawings, the craft is minimal and derived from magazines, but the emphasis is on a story whose very predictability is its uniqueness. You have to listen to the whole album in order, and though you may find yourself preferring different songs depending on where you are in your own narrative, it's a useful tool for putting yourself in glib perspective.
That said, my favorite song on it has always been "No". It's the concentrated version of the whole album - one minute and twenty seconds; Verse, chorus (with backups), verse, chorus, bridge (my favorite), solo, verse, chorus, verse, end; a gender-neutral voice; lyrics: one word. It affirms the observation I once made that I would enjoy listening to recordings of toddlers having tantrums.



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1. All The Time
2. Such A Joke
3. Wild Eyes
4. Going Insane
5. Tell The World
6. Where Do You Run To
7. Damaged
8. No
9. Never See Me Again
10. I Believe In Nothing

Darger: