Crib Notes

One thing that’s been hit particularly hard by the Orwellian gas shortage that’s crippling the Southeast is attendance at local shows. Brooklyn trio Vivian Girls tore it up for the enthusiastic, but sparse crowd that ventured to the Earl on Sunday night. The somber and freewheeling trio ran through a hazy batch of songs performed exactly as they appear on their album. Michigan’s Tyvek and local trio Rizzudo closed the show, with respectively ramshackle and adept performances.

But most people wandered out to the The Earl’s front patio during the show to socialize and speculate about the fuel crisis. Will it really be weeks before it’s over? Why isn’t this making national headlines? And where is Sonny Perdue during all of this? No radio, or television address, not even a blog saying “people, this is what we need to do…”

At least he posed on the capital steps and prayed for rain at the peak of the drought last year. Now he’s MIA when outside aide couldn’t come sooner. I read a local news website after the show that says he’s on vacation in Europe right now, which seems all too fitting. Whatever the case may be, he wasn’t at Vivian Girls’ show, and out of fear of using up what precious few gasoline drops we have left, not many other people were there either.

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Photo by Terry Woelfer

Brooklyn trio Vivian Girls craft a ghostly, melancholy pop sound that feels at home amid the current crop of younger acts taking cues from the noisier no wave of 1970s New York. Rather than sulking in the scrape and fuzz of peer acts, like Blank Dogs and No Age, Cassie Ramone (guitar/vocals), Kickball Katy (bass/vocals) and Ali Koehler (drums and vocals) work up a concoction of shoegazer punk and twee sounds bound by primitivism.

The ethereal fidelity of their self-titled debut, recently reissued by In the Red, wraps Phil Spector’s wall of sound around angelic girl-group coos that sound both familiar and far away. Songs such as “All the Time,” “Where Do You Run To” and “Never See Me Again” resonate with simple and addictive melodies that are both innocent and easy on the ears.

Alternating threads of gloom and elation come together throughout their songs and culminate in a wash of fleeting emotions that guide each number through a loosely conceptual album. “The songs were arranged in such a way that the first half of the album is about falling in love and the second half is about falling out of it,” frontwoman Ramone explains.

When speaking about her musical influences, she’s not concerned with dropping the names of artsy punk bands. Instead, she pines over Burt Bacharach of all people. “He is so brilliant it makes me wanna scream.”

She’s not kidding either. As she delves into what draws her to Bacharach’s songwriting, the unlikely influence becomes clear; as though she’s describing her own band’s sound to a fine point. “I like his songs because they are both really catchy and somewhat depressing and they evoke an instant sense of nostalgia, even if you’ve never heard the song before. He also does interesting things with phrasing and chord progressions,” she says. “That is what I aim for whenever I write a song.”

Vivian Girls with Rizzudo and Tyvek. $8. Sun., Sept. 28. 8 p.m. The Earl, 488 Flat Shoals Road. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.

Click below to read a short Q&A with Cassie Ramone and Kickball Katie.

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