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.

I'm still internetless at home. Today I drove a couple places (library, coffee bean & tea leaf) looking for internet until I came up empty handed and decided: Fuck it! Why am I wasting my morning getting all stressed over writing on this website when I can just save it until I get to work?

I spent my hour and a half before work playing Braid and beating it, which leads me to this bandwagon I have to jump on: Braid was awesome. Several times while playing I went, "Good lord, why am I playing this? It is so difficult!" and then I would feel satisfied having retrieved a particularly elusive puzzle piece but still, I would wonder, "Why am I playing this?" and then I'd pause for a moment and suck in the beauty of the art, the music, the way it's still pretty even in reverse and how even upon constant rewinding and near headache-inducing puzzle design the entire thing just feels so relaxing but still, I would wonder, "Why am I playing this?"

It wasn't until the very last level, when the 'story' that masks the deeper underlying story truly dawned on me and while I watched things re-ravel themselves in front of me I was moved, I was deeply moved. I stared at the screen transfixed and my eyes welled with tears briefly (but did not unleash them) and suddenly the whole journey made perfect sense, in that unexplainable way where you're sure everyone else will feel something different when they realize what has been underway.

I didn't mean to briefly review Braid in this entry but it's one of many indie games lately that combine excellent art design with excellent music to amazingly emotive means. Other examples: World of Goo (the only other game so far that is "on par" with Braid), And Yet It Moves (low on story but high on amazing platforming), and The Path (well,...).

I've liked this song for a while. I discovered Viva Voce through their album Get Yr Blood Sucked Out which opens with the great bluesy psychedelic stomp of Believer. (Which I am pretty sure I heard first on NPR way back when.) When I moved onto their earlier work, I discovered somewhat disappointedly that their sound is less rock and more dreamy electronica with slight psychedelic rock influences.

This song pretty much perfectly encapsulates the sound of Viva Voce's early work: it's dreamy, relaxing, and at times wonderfully intense, as if they're at the helm of a giant pressure washer that expels walls of bursting sunshiny sound right into your face. Big gushes of love, all over your face.

Song Note: I totally didn't realize I posted a Viva Voce song about a month ago until after I finished writing this up and posting it. Whoops. At least you get two songs that are near opposites of each other.

I heard this song on NPR when I lived in San Diego.

Wait. This album came out three years ago.

OK. I heard this song on... hmm...

Well, I don't actually know. I think I was driving.

Maybe I wasn't.

In September of 2006, I was...

21. Barely finishing my first month of being an active Twitter...er. Twitterer. Being incredibly emo over a break up that I should have been relieved about. I'd been 21 for 6 months and had yet to go to a bar, because I didn't really like to do anything. I think my main pass times at 21 were fanatically researching somewhat obscure (but totally in my demographic) Christian religious bullshit (Gnosticism) and searching for women who would tolerate me (and sleep with me, if there was something reasonably attractive about them) on OKCupid.

21 was like three years ago, that wasn't that long ago at all. It feels far away, because really, at that point, my "real life" had yet to even begin. I wonder that, in three years, I'll feel this same way about this time in my life. Part of me hopes I do, because I fear that "this is all there is" at this moment in time, like we all do sometimes, but another part of me thinks that I'll be the same as I am, just improved, maybe I'll have a six-pack or something. Maybe I'll own whatever the best Google phone is in three years. That'll make me pretty cool, I think.

Then another part of me realizes that our financial system is crumbling because it seems like everyone who traded a bunch of numbers around as if it were play money in a gigantic world-wide video-game just realized they were trading around a bunch of play money in a gigantic world-wide video-game when someone made a big mistake and actually asked for some real money that they could do something with aside from just swap it around between themselves for shiggles.

I'm pretty sure that we'll all be dead in 3 years. If it's not 2012 alone that kills us (and keep in mind, I don't believe in ghosts, nor aliens, but I'm totally certain we're going to transcend our physical forms and turn into trans-dimensional beings on the 21st of December 2012) then it's going to be the all out panic that occurs when everyone in the real world realizes that bits of paper are just as worthless as bits of numbers because they all mean fuck all when the rest of the world decides your bits of paper aren't 'real money' and then we'll just tear each other apart.

It's going to be rad. There will be fires. We won't have to worry about the government shutting down our raves. The roving packs of raiders in cage vans who drive into the middle of our raves and snatch up a couple people to sell them into slavery will still be a problem, but some of us will have awesome hair, like this guy with suits of leather armor. We'll fight over gasoline.

Or maybe the ice caps will melt and we'll fight over gasoline and dirt on big boats and shit. That'll be cool, too. Some of us will have gills.

Or maybe it won't be like that at all and there will be cities strewn across the US that merely lack the unifying aspect of a postal service, of a postman as it were, to re-band together and recreate the United States of America!

The future is going to be rad no matter what.