Vivian Girls

Ragged Words is meeting Vivian Girls in a quiet nook of Korova – Liverpool’s renowned electro-pop club. Chatty, outgoing and showing no signs of fatigue, it’s amazing to look at their past tour schedule and see that they’ve being playing shows almost constantly for the past 18 months. In fact, each member of the all-singing Brooklyn three-piece – Cassie plays electric guitar, Katy bass and Ali drums - are so enthusiastic you’d think this was a new experience for them:

“Touring is always an experience, mostly good,” says Katy, the fiery-haired bassist. “It definitely becomes a routine.”

“When I first started touring,” Ali, who took over drumming duties from now full-time Crystal Stilt Frankie Rose in July, says. “I jumped right in at a really busy time and was kind of overwhelmed and like ‘Oh my God!’ but now it’s ‘duh-da-duh‘, instead of waking up for class or going to school, now it’s waking up and driving somewhere.”

“It’s kind of like you lead two different lifestyles,” Cassie continues. “Life a and life b – life a is the life you lead at home and life b is the life you lead when you’re on the road – both are so familiar to by us now that it doesn’t even make a difference.”

Vivian Girls sound like seasoned professionals, but according to Katy it hasn’t always been easy: “We switch between those two lifestyles very easily now, but I remember at first it felt so disorienting to be home for a while and then go on tour again. Now, it’s really easy to switch modes.”

Katy and Cassie use the aliases Kickball Katy and Cassie Ramone respectively, but Ali retains her surname – Koehler. Why is that?

“Cassie and Katy had nicknames before the band,” says Ali. “They’ve always had those nicknames like as long as I’ve known them.”

Cassie interjects: “Those are just our aliases, all our friends knew us as Kickball Katy and Cassie Ramone for years and years,” she says.

“Yeah, when Ali joined the band we weren’t going to be like ‘So, what’s your new Vivian Girls nickname!” says Katy.

The evidently personable and likeable threesome’s self-titled debut, re-issued in September by L.A. garage imprint In The Red after an initial limited run was quickly snapped up, has received good press, particularly an 8.5 sized endorsement by Pitchfork. For a debut act to receive the website’s praise will certainly open Vivian Girls to a wider international audience. I ask the band if they read reviews.

“Yeah, we do,” says Katy. And on the Pitchfork review: “It felt good.”

“It was an honour,” says Cassie. “Because you know, Pitchfork don’t give every band a good review, we all gave ourselves pats on the back, it felt really great.”

“We totally high-fived,” says Katy.

‘It felt like I won,’ Ali concludes.

They’re excited about beginning work on their second album and tonight they’ll be playing new material. I am interested to hear about the creative process seeing that much has been made of who the trio sounds like, rather than the standout quality of their record. ‘Tell the World’ is one of the album’s most immediately awesome tracks, a contender in various song-of-the-year polls. It’s a love song: “He sees what I see/He feels what I feel/I’ll tell the world about the love that I found.” There’s a real sense of simplicity about the lyrics which is quite remarkable considering the complexity of its subject:

“I wrote that song about my ex-boyfriend,” says Cassie. “He was really into psychic stuff, and we’d always try to be psychic together, it’s kind of creepy but it’s true. I don’t know. I wrote that song after we’d broken up but then we hung out again one time and I was like, ‘Holy shit, I’m still in love with him, it’s insane.’ That’s what it’s about.”

The video for the song (above) is a real gem, low-budget in appearance but rich in imagination – including the obligatory person dancing in a bear suit. Timothy Fiore is the director, a close friend and roommate of the band who also makes an appearance in the video as a devilish creature stroking his moustache.

It’s likely that critics will look to compare Vivian Girls to artists that have come before them, particularly lesser-known, niche indie bands who they happen to sound like. That could be because they’ve come pretty much from nowhere and there isn’t any prior major release to comment on, or any previous gossip to fill column inches. Vivian Girls deserve better than that.

“We get compared to a lot of bands we’ve never even heard,” Katy says.

Cassie recalls a recent interview where she was told, ‘You guys are definitely influenced by The Shop Assistants and The Flatmates.’

“We might sound like those bands because we have the same influences as those bands,” says Katy.

Perhaps Vivian Girls belong more to a geographical bracket where genre is overlooked. Recently they’ve played with High Places and Crystal Stilts, two fellow Brooklyn residing bands who’ve released debuts in 2008. Yet High Places in particular have a completely different sound to Vivian Girls - Rob Barber and Mary Pearson don’t play guitars, while their live sound is based around pre-recorded acoustic samples and live percussion. It turns out though that Vivian Girls have friends in High Places:

“I used to go to college at PRATT – it’s an arts school in Brooklyn,” says Cassie. “When I was a sophomore Rob Barber was the manager of the imaging lab, the computer lab for my major in Communications Design. I always used to hassle him about getting a job, but then he left and started High Places. Whenever I hang out with High Places it feels like I’m hanging out with what could’ve been my boss.”

The turn-out for tonight’s show is decent and Katy does her best to get the audience closer to the stage. English audiences are renowned for their silence between songs, particularly with bands like Vivian Girls who many in attendance may be investigating rather than supporting. But Ali, Cassie and Katy each have a microphone and they impress the crowd, the applause increases in volume after each song. Katy has recently broken a bass string, ‘Who breaks a bass strings?’ she quips, while Cassie manages to break two B-strings on two different guitars. It’s all part of the performance. Their quality is typified by Ali’s excellent, fast-paced drumming and it’ll be interesting to see what she adds to the new record. Vivian Girls tell us they’ll return home for a month in January to work on new material which they hope will be released in September 2009. In the meantime their British fan base is growing and rightfully so.