REVIEW AND PHOTOS BY IAN HRABE
The hardest part about seeing Vivian Girls live is trying to see through their ineffable charm. When the ladies take the stage and fill a 45-minute set with noisy, garage-rock-influenced indie-pop, it's easy to fall in love with the way they've reinvented the girl group.
Despite pretty much adoring their eponymous 2008 debut, I've spent the six months since I first heard that record experiencing a whirlwind of reactions to Vivian Girls. At first I loved them for being reminiscent of the short-lived '90s indie-pop outfit Black Tambourine then derided them for ripping them off. Seeing them live made me understand that both of these were true at the same time.
Though they exploded out of the gate last night at the Jackpot with "All the Time," the opening jam that hooked everyone who put on Vivian Girls for the first time, the rest of the first half of the set was a drag.
Given their style, their influences (which outweigh any semblance of originality) and the fact that all of the songs in the first half of the set sounded pretty indistinguishable, all of my conclusions seemed to ring true. However, halfway through they made a reference to their adoration of the Get Up Kids, which made them more endearing than they already were. (Singer Cassie Ramone had written TGUK on the knuckles of her left hand.)
When they played "Second Date," from their most recent release, the Surf's Up 7-inch, I fell in love with them all over again. On this song, they take classic girl-group notions and make them their own. Then they launched into their single, "Tell the World," the one song on Vivian Girls that sets them apart from their influences. Through gloomy guitars, eerie harmonies and a standard punk-rock drumbeat that turns sinister in the breakdown, they recall the Henry Darger paintings that inspired the band's namesake. This immediately led into "Wild Eyes," which, at less than two-minutes long, doesn't give you time to analyze its influences.
During the last song, the band played a game of pseudo-musical chairs, in which they all rotated to the right and switched instruments for a noisy rock-out. The Girls' sound may never evolve, but they're still pretty fun to see live.
Nonetheless, tour-intersectors Ponytail upstaged them. Through some weird booking issues, Ponytail took the stage next and, even though half of the crowd had left after Vivian Girls finished, put on one of the best shows I've seen in a while.
Where Vivian Girls tread on various influences, Ponytail have crafted a sound that is completely their own. Frontwoman Molly Siegel subverts traditional lyrics for vocals that sound like a combination of bird calls, a made-up language by second graders, and the noises you make when you're trying to figure out the vocal line for a song. Somehow this all works, and a lot of this is due to the intricacy of the band's math-rock double-guitar assault, which recalls bands like Deerhoof and Abe Vigoda while still sounding original.
There's something affable about the way Siegel sprays her mouth with Binaca breath freshener after each song -- and something hardcore about it, too. The way she manipulates her voice has got to be destroying her throat.
Based on the 20-foot mic cable I saw her winding around her hand right before Ponytail started up, I assumed Siegel would end up in the audience at some point, and during the last song, she did. But it didn't feel that she was trying too hard, they way some bands seem when they end up in the audience and it feels like a cheap way for them to make a connection with you because they can't do it with the music. Though preconceived, it was still really cool and felt spontaneous, even though it was expected from a group that has been dubbed "Baltimore's best live band."
Unlike Vivian Girls, Ponytail felt honest, real and presented something new and refreshing. Openers Tracer Face, a new project fronted by Brad Shanks of Blood on the Wall and Bandit Teeth, mixed kick-ass indie rock jams with Slint-inspired post-rock dirges. Expo 70 brought a half-hour of drone and guitar squall noise (replete with smoke machines) that was interesting for about 10 minutes out of the 30 they played, and Fag Cop played their typical loud-ass, obnoxious punk, but unlike the last time I saw them, after which my ears rang for two days, this time they only slightly managed to dent my eardrums.
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Enjoyed your bit on Ponytail, only came around to them a couple weeks ago, which was after I'd written off the idea of seeing The Vivian Girls on a Monday night.
"However, only anime porn could produce a comparable assortment of ambiguously ecstatic/pained noises from an ambiguously aged female. It's like Ponytail wants to play garage-surf instrumentals, but its guitar strings keep tentacle-raping some knee-socked schoolgirl." Now I'm not going to be able to listen to Ponytail without thinking about tentacle raping. GREAT!
Andrew Miller would disagree with you about Ponytail.
http://www.somethingawful.com/...
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