Vietnam
Label: Kemado
Length: LP
Website: http://www.vtnm.net/
Release Date: 2007-01-23
Media: CD
Format: Album
WorkNameSort: Vietnam
Snare rolls and guitar wailing mark a lot of the deeply medicated blues on Vietnam’s full-length debut, but don’t discount the colorful portraits of departed friends and simpler times that seem voiced by a man twice the age of lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist Michael Gerner. Most of the verses from Gerner are at first spoken, as if he’d spent a month in his bedroom indulging in Lou Reed records as frequently as he ruminates on the magnitude of a coke high. The plentiful guitar anthems on Vietnam would fit snugly alongside grainy videos of late-’60s flag burning protesters in the street, but a significant amount of this album is slowly churning blues (as interpreted by the Stones), with Gerner’s throaty, Pabst-worn sentiments recorded way up front in the mix.
‘Welcome to My Room,â?� also a pre-album digital single, rumbles at freight-train speed over mostly muted, gritty riffs and drunk-and-hollering vocals. The tempo stalls at a chugging limp after a few minutes, and lead guitarist Josh Grubb wanders up the fretboard, while Gerner communicates a series of weed-paranoid remarks, suggesting that ‘the doorâ?� be ‘padlockedâ?� because he’s being spied ‘on all the time.â?� A ferocious exit solo follows this mistrust of neighbors almost too well, balancing Vietnam’s healthy emulation of ’60s stoner jams with Greg Ginn’s noisy fingerwork on Black Flag’s ‘Damaged.â?� ‘Welcomeâ?� pushes the bare-fisted rock sound that Vietnam is most adept at construing ‘ this serving of believable bombast is far more appealing than the lazy ‘Sweet Virginiaâ?�-aping (sax solo included) on ‘Mr. Goldfingerâ?� ‘ and the band’s balladry comes across even sweeter.
A ponderous arpeggiated-riff-and-organ-bound memoir about a deceased friend named Toby (‘I remember nudging you every 30 minutes just to see if you’d awakeâ?�) is bound to make more of a dent when this record breaks than guests involved in this sometimes ornamentally augmented recording will (Beachwood Sparks personnel, Maroon 5 dudes), or the fact that Vice Records shafted the hell out of Vietnam on the promo end of 2004’s The Concrete’s Always Grayer on the Other Side of the Street EP. These hairy Williamsburg dwellers aren’t without odes to their record collection faves, but an artful approach is in the air at the launch, when Michael Gerner begins the LP with a whirlwind of spoken narrative-styled vocalizing (‘Step On Insideâ?�) over jamming that doesn’t overpower the lush choral backups and string section. Gerner’s front and center, and it’s a genuinely, refreshingly good thing he is.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2007.