Vivian Girls: Love, Actually

Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Members:  Kickball Katy (bass), Ali Koehler (drums), Cassie Ramone (vocals, guitar).
Album: Everything Goes Wrong
For Fans Of: The Jesus and Mary Chain, Phil Spectorized girl groups, The Vaselines

"Everyone can relate to a love song, no matter how personal it is to the writer,” says Cassie Ramone, one singing/guitar-playing third of Vivian Girls. “There aren’t many other song topics that can be so personal and universal at the same time.” Indeed, her band’s sophomore record, Everything Goes Wrong, takes its name from a particularly lovelorn line in one of its songs: “When everything goes wrong, will you sit around and miss me when I’m gone?” Everything follows Vivian Girls’ self-titled May 2008 release, the 500-copy vinyl-only first pressing of which sold out in 10 days. This prompted garage-rock imprint In the Red to pluck the band from the Mauled By Tigers label and re-release the album on CD and LP that October.

Critics took well to the Brooklyn trio’s mix of girl-group vocal harmonies buried under a metric ton of punk fuzz, and Vivian Girls were soon recording once again. For Everything Goes Wrong, the band holed up at Los Angeles studio The Distillery with In the Red house producer Mike McHugh. Hoping to slow down and stretch out a little—the new album tops 35 minutes, compared to its predecessor’s 21—while avoiding a belabored recording process, Vivian Girls managed to finish the record in eight busy days.

“We’d get there around noon, hang out with Mike McHugh a little bit, then get to work, usually ’til midnight,” Ramone says. “Mixing was the craziest part. We’d never mixed any of our recordings analog before, and from our experience it’s very different than mixing digitally. You’d listen to the same song over and over again, from beginning to end, for at least two hours.”

A stronger Vivian Girls exists now that Ramone and her bandmates—bassist Kickball Katy and drummer Ali Koehler—have learned what it’s like to earn the kind of fickle love the Internet bestows upon buzzy new rock bands. From the sound of Everything Goes Wrong, the tough-love experiences of critical praise and contrarian rejection have given the Girls a new confidence, even if the increased exposure took some getting used to.

“All of that was weird to us,” Ramone says. “When we recorded the first album, we weren’t expecting many people to hear it besides us and our friends. So it was surprising to get attention for it, and then when the backlash happened it was really disheartening; we cried a lot. I think the whole experience made us tougher as people and less naive.”