Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts and Six O’ Clock Saints [whom-I-only-saw-two-songs-of-but they-were-good] At the DC9 Club

August 15, 2008 by Peter  Send to a Friend

This was a sweet show, for some of the wrong reasons. I hadn’t reviewed anything in a while and I was dying to get out of the house, so the bands could have drooled listlessly on their instruments or been a bunch of lemurs banging on boxes and I would have loved it. That’s actually a pretty accurate description for the show, except with reverb. The Crystal Stilts shambled and rambled and the Vivian Girls stuttered and fluttered. They may have both been from Brooklyn, but they seemed more like escapees from a really backwater part of the Pacific Northwest. Probably it’s because they both seem to have hit on the novel (for this decade) combination of 80s shoegaze-pop and 90s cuddlecore—pretty much what Nirvana did in the opposite direction.

In short they don’t move around much and play super-catchy uber-simple songs with unintelligible reverb vocals and harmonies and they bop a little but don’t bother rocking out on stage and are an admirable mixture of adorable and fashionably aloof and if they were a movie they’d be a remake of Gummo with puppets and if they were a writing contest they’d be the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest because they are making me write wildly idiotic analogies in this review so far.

So in tribute to this tour and the five tequila/pineapple juice cocktails that I sucked down during the show (that henceforth will be called “Dream Pop”) I present a bunch of late entries into the rock criticism category of the Bulwer-Lytton (and its scrappy one-liner cousin the Lyttle Lytton), sponsored by Brightest Young Things and Your Tax Dollars. Feel free to write your own deliciously terrible music journalism in the comments or on your own blog for the rest of your life!

Scene: The Crystal Stilts

The Crystal Stilts are garage rock angels who fell out of garage rock heaven and are pretty upset about it but they can’t get back because the gravity is too heavy down here.

What he didn’t know, helped him: the keyboard player was the most animated member of the band but despite all of his dancing and emotion his keyboard was so quiet it may have been unplugged.

The guitarist tuned up between every tune, as if he needed to tune his guitar to a different untuned tuning for the songs to sound as amazingly bleary-eyed boozy as they did, which he did not.

The lead singer didn’t know what to do with his body when he wasn’t mumbling with it so he just looked at the audience as if it was our turn to give the news reports at the news desk. The guitar player turned his back and didn’t look at the audience at all, but none of us knew why.

The bass player’s bass amp broke and made a noise like a farting penguin whenever he played the E string, but, also like a penguin, he didn’t notice.

The drummer noticed though, and made a face like a person who has just noticed that a nearby penguin, or person, has farted. She was totally awesome. Besides being attractive, she played the fuck out of the drums without using cymbals (which I’ve always thought were unnecessary) or the desire to keep songs at a particular tempo (which I used to think was necessary but have since changed my mind).

The last song had three notes, but what notes! I think one of them was G. It was a blues—the blues that Muddy Waters would have written if he was drowning in quaaludes so deep his friends would have to shorten his name to Sediment.

There was a single moment then when I understood what they were singing about, and I flashed on an image of thunderclouds rolling over a English moor where a giant Celt, horned with the antlers of the King and draped in blood-soaked fur, broke up with his high-school girlfriend. But then I flashed on a bunch of other images and none of them made sense.

Act 2: Vivian Girls
Vivian Girls is a good name for a band with a lot of girls in it who sound like the ranting of a gentle pedophile.

If Cub and the Cocteau Twins had a baby, it would sound like this band, and it would look like a really sexy movie for me to watch.

The songs were short, like this sentence. Fragments of a quilt. Of rock.

The bass player (Redhead) had some blistering back-up vocal skills. She would go AooAAooAAOoAAAOOAh and everyone swooned. (I assume, I was too busy swooning to look around)!

When the (Blond) lead singer/guitar player played/sang she would turn one Ked shoe in toward the other as if she was asking the audience to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with her in 1978, but when she was playing and not singing, she planted her feet firmly on the ground which is much better for her lumbar, considering that it is 2008.

The drummer had Black hair, which is probably why she did lots of fancy rolls and made tough faces to show that she could easily be in cool punk band, like the Refused, or Blondie.

When the bass player said that the Next Song was the First Song On Our New Album she giggled as if no-one had ever said it before. Then they played a song so wonderful that Cheap Trick and the Beastie Boys appeared in a fountain of light and held hands and kicked the Cocteau Twins out of the fountain for being too wussy. After the last song she stepped on a reverb pedal so that she could cleanly tell us to go buy t-shirts without having it sound like she was trying to tell Agent Cooper that Laura Palmer is in the Red Room or that it’s time to wake up and have pancakes Peter.

If there was a mosh pit at one of their shows it would be one of those odd, unexpectedly apropos things, like finding a beef patty in a milkshake. (That metaphor wasn’t bad actually; maybe I should save it for another time, like when you find a beef patty in a milkshake?)

Later, she told me that they are going to reprint their album because it done sold out and that some douchebag bought a CD-R of it on ebay for 60 bucks and that she wishes, the bass player, that she had known how much they’d be worth because she had a bunch just lying around and if she hadn’t lost them she would be Rich, Rich I Tell You, but I was playing it somewhat cool so I just swooned instead of asking for my money back for the CD-R.

Earlier, the guitarist told me that she can’t wait to read this article, but now I bet she can.

Conclusion: A Dark and Stormy Night
Rock and roll is way too old and studious a genre these days, weighed down with meticulous craftsmen/showman-ships and the furled sails of breathless mediocrity. Anchors aweigh!

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