September/October 2009 Issue

Music Monday: Review: Vivian Girls, Everything Goes Wrong

Brooklyn’s girl group brings new edginess to old boy-trouble tales.

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Named after characters created by creepy outsider artist Henry Darger, Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls achieve first-take nirvana on their second album. The female trio follows the lead of the Jesus and Mary Chain, putting classic pop styles through a garage-band meat grinder. Their deadpan voices ranging from sullen self-absorption to glassy-eyed calm, the Girls bring an aura of lurking tension to these familiar tales of boy trouble. With their scraping guitars and rattling drums, “When I’m Gone” and “Can’t Get Over You” feel like warped artifacts of the girl-group era.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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