Viva Voce's Kevin and Anita Robinson are definitely my favorite music couple out of the whole bunch of 'em that are out there. (Suck it Handsome Furs! P.S. I love you too.) Viva Voce's music has always been in flux. At times their earlier albums sound kind of like shoegaze of the Ride variety mixed with shoegaze of the Boo Radleys variety, which is to say sometimes it's heavy on the dreamy pop but it's buried under the waves, and they even got pretty dance-y at times.

For 2006's Get Yr Blood Sucked Out they shifted a bit to what struck me as more of a 70's stoner rock sound, which I loved. By 2009's Rose City they sounded more like a full rock band than ever before (because they were) but the songs lost a lot of the really heavy shoegaze moments. Still, I loved it, maybe even more than any album before it.

Around this same time, their other band Blue Giant was starting to take off. It was obvious to me: Blue Giant was "Kevin's band", a clear extension and development of Kevin's influences over both Get Yr Blood Sucked Out and Rose City. Sure, it was more country than anything Viva Voce had ever done, but it felt right, and Blue Giant's debut album fits nicely right beside Viva Voce in my playlists.

For this album, they're back to basics. Said to be recorded in only four weeks by only by Kevin and Anita, The Future Will Destroy You is both a return to form and (what feels to me) a solid declaration that, yes, Viva Voce is "Anita's band". While they still sound more like a full rock band than their early albums, the shoegaze and psychedelia is back in a big way. Tellingly, Anita is the lead vocalist on every song, where past albums had at least one or two songs with Kevin singing, but this gets no complaints from me.

On this album it really just sounds like there's more of her in her voice. Maybe it's just time doing its work, but Anita's voice (and even Kevin's) have taken on such a hearty, earthy, breathy sound over the years that they're just a joy to listen to. On early albums it would have been easy to mistake Anita's voice for, say, Emily Haines' younger days, but now it's clear: this is the voice of Viva Voce, embodying what I like about their music: that aforementioned hearty, earthy feeling.

I don't want to get too much into hyperbole, but it is one of the joys of Viva Voce. When the Dandy Warhols' would dive into shoegaze and psychedelic songs there was always a hard edge to it no matter how mellow they got---it was probably because they were a drinking band, and Viva Voce, if they're not pot smokers, are just a we're just down to earth, cool people band. That comes across. I can feel it, thanks to the THC.

To be specific: this is a great Viva Voce album, and a great album in a year where I'm pretty sure I've been disappointed by pretty much everything that has come out so far. If you're already a fan of Viva Voce, like me, then I think it's impossible for you to not like it. It's a Viva Voc-ier Viva Voce. If you're new to Viva Voce, I hope you like shoegaze, psychedelia, and strong hooks, because this is music you should be listening to.

And on a related note...

My promotional copy of this album arrived unusually. Normally albums arrive as MP3s bundled up into a zip file, a free copy of the album---and this is definitely one of the perks of being a music blogger who doesn't make a fucking dime off his website because he's cool as hell and doesn't run advertisements and knows no one buys music anymore so the album art that links to Amazon MP3 is largely a waste of time (in 2 years I've made $.40).

This one, though, sent me to a portal run by EMI (I guess Viva Voce's label, Vangaurd, is distributed by EMI). I had to put in my name, email address, and check off on a user agreement that probably said I wasn't allowed to do something like write a blog post about the EMI portal I was signing up for. After this, I was taken to a screen with albums I was authorized to listen to, which was this one.

The album page informed me that if I was able to download the songs (which I wasn't, I think) that they were digitally watermarked so that they'd catch me if I leaked them. I thought: Well, this is nice. I don't mind being treated like a possible douchebag, because I understand so many people are, so it's not like I'm bitter about that. I don't even mind that I don't get my own personal free copy of the album in advance, because I understand that record labels want to prevent leaks. (If they gave me a free copy on release, that'd be nice, but really, no big deal.)

I could only stream the album from the website, and it didn't sound very good to me. I wasn't sure if it was maybe just the album sounding kind of lousy, or if the MP3s were encoded at 128kbps or less. Either way, I figured I'd go ahead and see if all these protection measures EMI had levied actually prevented the album from leaking.

So I totally did that by asking my friend to go and look on his favorite private music torrent site, and guess what? Viva Voce's "The Future Will Destroy You" was on there. He downloaded it, even though I sternly told him not to and we listened to it and compared it to the streaming version from EMI. Maybe it was just in my head, if I am proven wrong I wouldn't be entirely surprised, it could always have been a placebo effect of being annoyed by a streaming copy making it sound like worse than it was, but I'm pretty sure the leaked version was higher quality.

That's where my beef begins. You can treat me like a possible thief all you want, if you have a legitimate reason to do it. The fact is, though, the record labels like EMI are living in this delusional fantasy world where they think they have a fighting chance to prevent their music from leaking early. They don't. They haven't for years. They still insist on trying though, and when it inconveniences me and it's clear there's no reason to even try anymore, that's when it pisses me off. I can't even post the song I like the most (opener "Plastic Radio" maybe, or maybe "Black Mood Ring") because the only song I'm allowed to post is this one, which I don't think is the strongest track anyway.

There's absolutely no reason EMI shouldn't just be handing out MP3s to music bloggers, especially after the album actually leaks. It's not hard to see when an album leaks, you see tracks no one should be listening to pop up on Last.FM. At that point it's game over.

Nothing against Viva Voce, and nothing against their label's PR person, but everything against silly useless protection schemes that do nothing but inconvenience honest people like me who are just trying to promote a band's music pretty much out of the kindness of, and devotion in, our hearts.

Leakers gonna leak. Don't tread on me.

There's this story I like to tell, from back when I was a wee one fresh off my freshman year of high school. That summer, me and three other friends of mine would ride around town on our bicycles and smoke pot throughout the day at various public parts. A lot of the time we'd smoke in the restrooms at the park around the corner from my house. (One time, me and my buddy were standing in the one stall, locked in there, smoking a pipe, and a little kid came in: "What are you doing in there?" he asked loudly. "Going to the bathroom!" I responded. "BOTH OF YOU!??" the boy shouted shocked. We hurried out of there heads down past his mother.)

One day my three buddies called me and told me to meet them at the park, so I scurried on my bike around the corner and since they were lagging it a bit, I took the opportunity to smoke a little of my weed on my own. When they got there I was already blazed, and they immediately thrust a big fat joint into my hands. "We just rolled this, and we figured since you're such a homie you can go ahead and light it and take the first drag!" I was pretty shocked, since no one ever gave me greens on anything, but I went with it.

I lit it and took a pretty decent drag. They were all staring at me kind of funny. I blew it out. "It doesn't taste funny?" one asked.

"No, I think it tastes alright I guess," I answered. As I went to put it up to my lips again, the joint was slapped out of my hands.

"Dude!" They all started laughing. "That joint was full of grass, like lawn clippings, dude! You couldn't tell?!"

"No... but whatever." I didn't really care that much since I was already super high, but they were having a good laugh, but their reaction was more shock that I actually hit it without noticing it was grass, as if they didn't expect the joint to even get to the being lit phase, so they weren't really laughing at me so much. I enjoy telling the story because most people react with: Wow, what dickheads, making their friend smoke grass---and when you're a kid you believe that if you smoke grass it's like the worst possible thing for you to do.

But I was high, and when you're high as a kid it's so much more fun than it is when you're an adult. These days it's just a thing you do, and sure you get high but it's kind of just like another setting you can be on---a more pleasant, enjoyable setting, but it's nothing too dissimilar from what every day life is like. When you're a kid it's like a whole new fucking world. What you thought was stupid is now funny, what was ugly is pretty, what was benign is incredible. It's kind of like what being drunk is like as an adult. (And that's the fine line between being stoned and drunk, that people never understand, with pot you're never a different person, you're just a softer-edged version of who you really are. People seem to act like getting drunk is adult time to play pretend, and run away in that fantasy.)

So I was high and it didn't really matter that much to me, so I think it's a pretty funny story. I guess not many people are willing to tell a story in which they're the punchline, but really, it was a good gag. One time, though, I told this story, and someone got kind a little more upset at my buddies than I thought was warranted, and it was then that I realized the second side of the story isn't really something I should leave out.

They had their reasons. The truth comes out! When I was a kid even though I was spoiled in a lot of ways, I never got an allowance or felt like I could ever ask for money from my parents---even asking for a dollar would elicit a groan that made me wish I had never asked---sure they'd buy me stuff but money, no. As a stoner in high school, this made life difficult and usually weedless. As a result, I ended up smoking a lot of my friends pot---and when opportunities presented themselves sometimes stole it from people as well.

Every now and then I'd scrounge some money up, or some stolen pot, but in those moments I was fiercely possessive of it and didn't share it at all with anyone, usually not even telling people I had it so I wouldn't have to part with my precious. But you'll remember in the story, I got stoned in the bathroom with my own pot that day before they showed up, and purposefully too so that I wouldn't have to let on that I had pot to them. They rolled that grass joint mainly as a way to get back at me for never really smoking them out.

A month or so later, I was confronted by the 'leader' of the three guys I hung out with. I got told they didn't want to hang out with me anymore because I just smoked everyone's pot. I explained that I don't have money like they did---they all lived above the boulevard you see, and I was right below it---and it was nice they were understanding about it up til now but this sucks! There was no reasoning with them however, and I found myself friendless.

Wait, this didn't go the right way. By the end you were supposed to hate me instead of them. Oh well. I'm high, don't even know why I wrote this really. Whatever. I smoked a grass joint once for a little bit. It was pretty funny!