Artist Profile: Vivian
Vivian, the Brooklyn-based shoegaze band, operates with a certain intentionality and clarity of sound that is informed not only by frontwoman Christine Bee’s years of experience in the New York rock scene but also by the unique and interminable contributions of each of her bandmates– Liam McCarthy on bass, Michael Ruocco on Drums, and Claire Collins on vocals and guitar. Their latest EP, “Third Eye Demos”, serves as an indication of the distinctiveness of the sounds to come on their debut LP. They combine a tasteful angst with a lyrical earnestness– a clear desire for loudness with a deeply-rooted sense of sonic purpose– and the result is a sound that is undeniably Vivian in its essence.
When Bee’s time with her former band, Smooth McDuck, came to an end, she felt rather directionless creatively. She had big ideas, including a desire to pursue a full-blown metal album, but the pressures of life became too great to overcome. She took a break from music for nearly a year, and in the process, began exploring what the foundation for another project would entail and in what direction she would desire to take it.
She knew she wanted it to be darker (and less occasionally flippant) than her former band was both in sound and aesthetic identity. Jokingly, she compares the next stage of building the band, her hunting for who would be willing to join her in this endeavour, to the construction of a super-team— like in Soderbergh’s blockbuster Ocean’s Eleven.
The first person she approached was Ruocco, whom she knew from her high school music scene and who had spent the past few years as a drummer for various bands around NYC. Ruocco was well-versed in a number of styles, and she knew he was the right choice to help implement the distinct vision she had in mind for Vivian.
“Vivian spoke very violet to me… It just feels like a very moody, brooding, atmospheric sort of color to sound coordination,” said Bee, “Not that that's what the whole band is going to be or what this project will be entirely, but that felt like a place to start with it… It felt like a safe sort of persona for me to explore in the abstract, creating someone who's more confident or has a different view of themselves than maybe I do of myself.”
From there, Bee and Ruocco recruited McCarthy, who had known Christine during their time in college and also orbited musically around her through various projects. Although they had never directly worked together in the past outside of small and informal jam sessions, McCarthy immediately knew he wanted to be involved in whatever the trio could put together.
As a three-piece, they started work on their first, self-titled EP– “Vivian”. Across four tracks, the EP established the earliest intentions for the band’s sound– it was deeply intimate in its fidelity, but it was sensationally loud in its execution. It was something that rose above the mixture of the bandmate’s various influences. It was, according to Ruocco, deeply unique.
“The first songs we played… I was hearing a dozen different sorts of bands. I kind of feel, even as we've been writing new music and growing, as I'm going back and listening to the stuff we're writing, I'm hearing that even more and more and more and more. You really can't pin [it down to] one thing.”
After the release of the first EP, their addition of Collins to the band enabled them to further realize the sound they had already begun pursuing. Collins had experience in both country and bluegrass bands as well as in heavier, more punk-oriented groups, and upon her arrival to NYC, was looking to join a band that matched the latter description. She immediately added an extra flair to their guitar-driven moments on “Third Eye Demos”. From the caressing swells crashing over “swanky”’s towering walls to the more mellow valleys of “first of the month”, the chemistry between Bee and Collins as the band’s paired guitarists was immediately apparent.
But on the new record, Collins took on more of a songwriting role, joining Bee in crafting the band’s starkly emotional and, at times, painstakingly vulnerable lyrics. For Collins, it was an opportunity to express a side of herself artistically that was, in some ways, suppressed by her work in her previous genres.
“Historically, I wrote these folk-country diss tracks, things like Bob Dylan,” said Collins, “And this band's been really fun for me, because the lyrics are, I would describe them as a lot more earnest and heartfelt. So I really got to write in a style that is much more vulnerable than I'm normally comfortable [with] and much more in touch with my emotions and how I feel about things.”
While their new project will certainly sound different with the additional emotional nuance that Collins’ songwriting provides, it will also serve as a direct continuation of the balance the band was attempting to strike on their first two record– a tenuous stability and clarity of production that separates Vivian’s sound from shoegaze as it is traditionally known.
Their two EPs, therefore, serve as stepping stones to their newest project from the perspective of that balance. As one of the most intriguing and deeply charismatic groups in a burgeoning Brooklyn rock scene, fans of their first two projects should anticipate a transformation, and a distinct continuation, of the sound they’ve cultivated across their output thus far.
“It'll include stuff [from “Third Eye Demos”] that we're going to re-record with higher fidelity,” said McCarthy, “... But for the most part, the other songs that we're adding were generated as a group, [while] the other songs were a lot more Christine's brainchild solely. And, you know, I think it's not even so much that the sound is changing that much, but it's just expanding. The world is filling in.”
