An oft-overlooked aspect of music is choosing how many people you want in your band. Some people settle for three or four, while fools like The Polyphonic Spree and Blazin Squad feel you need at least 150.
Viva Voce, though, don't have time to worry about crap like numbers because Viva Voce – just two of them, by the way; Anita Robinson and her husband Kevin – are busy making fuzzy poppy catchy dense freak-out psych indie masterpieces like new album Get Yr Blood Sucked Out that, if you haven't already guessed, we can't get enough of.
When you think of boy/girl two-piece bands, chances are The White Stripes are the first band to spring to mind – a couple of pallid kids in matching clothes that make music that sounds like it was recorded in an upturned metal dustbin. Viva Voce, though, are closer in spirit to the other great boy/girl two-piece band of our time, Joy Zipper. But only just – Viva Voce and Joy Zipper share the sweet sighed vocal, the bewilderment that only two people could have created the music that they make and not a lot else. Musically, Get Yr Blood Sucked Out by Vida Voce – the follow up to the acclaimed The Heat Can Melt Your Brain – sounds like a lost recording by a brilliant underground band from 35 years ago. As if you needed telling, that's a good thing.
Get Yr Blood Sucked Out by Viva Voce opens with Believer, a desert-dry mix of Spaceman 3 drone and Plastic Ono drums. When Planets Collide flips from being a sludge-rock jam into a candy-coated indie anthem so insidiously that you barely notice for the first two or three listens. Those two songs set the blueprint for the rest of Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, as Viva Voce clearly thrive in the realm of widescreen hypnotic Americana jams with girls cooing over the top, but that's not to say that they disappoint on any level. There's something on Get Yr Blood Sucked Out for any lovers of drowsy melodies, buzzsaw guitars and elliptical song progressions and, by our reckoning, that's everyone.
Any changes to the formula are subtle, but welcome nonetheless. First singe From The Devil Himself adds a big fat dollop of pop to the mixture, while eight-minute centrepiece So Many Miles is incredible; switching from indie rock to aggressive brass-led funk to two final minutes of full-on psych-out wiggy jamminess. Usually a song like So Many Miles would smack of indulgence, but Viva Voce somehow make it sound thrilling. That it's followed up by the most tuneful thing on Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, the piano ballad/ suicide note/ statement of intent/ Velouria rip-off We Do Not Fuck Around just enhances it further.
With Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, Viva Voce have come up with an album that's hardly varied but expertly put together. What's more, we hear they're pretty spiffy live, too.
Now buy Get Yr Blood Sucked Out by Viva Voce from Amazon
[story by Stuart Heritage]