THE VITAMEN
Sounds Like: Infectious, upbeat hooks like the Kinks; weird, funny lyrics like the Moldy Peaches; deadpan poignancy like Pavement.
Signature Lyric: Was every girl on earth molested or am I just bad in bed?
The Guys: The trio attended high school together in Mamaroneck, New York, where front man Jesse Blockton and bassist Matt Hyams also attended Hebrew School. Eventually they joined up with drummer Dave Rozner "from a rival temple," says Blockton. Years later they took their sound to Los Angeles, but found California "to suck shit" and returned to New York City. "People get us here," says Hyams. "LA is more about suicide. New York is more about having fun."
The Message: The Vitamen have a particular brand of modern masculine obsessive-compulisive insecurity that you can actually sing along to. But they are also so emotionally potent that whether they are playing an unsentimental ballad about the excrutiating quest to protect one's mother from life's disappointments ("I'm gonna do everything in my power/to get money to give to you"), or harmonizing about masturbatory anxiety, you find yourself caring improbably deeply.
NY Magazine, Music Issue - 16 hot bands changing the soundscape of New York
The Vitamen - Catchy downer music and words that ferret out details funnier and more embarrassing than most twentysomething sarcasts are smart enough to notice, much less write songs about.
Robert Christgau, Village Voice
The Vitamen's funny, cynical indie pop shines on the trio's new Children of the Bear
Time Out NY
The Vitamen are making moves: A competing local weekly (scooped, of course, by the Voice) quoted these Fountains of Wayne-worthy pop-rock wiseacres saying they found Cali to "suck shit"; their songs, about jerking off and loving their moms, all sound equally snarky and sincere.
Nick Catucci, Village Voice
There must be bigger sourpusses than these guys among the thousands of DIY rockers in this town without pity. But don't be so sure they're this bracing and sardonic.
Robert Christgau, Village Voice
The Vitamen are three awkward guys with sweet, strained vocals playing some killer cynical pop.
Time Out NY
THE VITAMEN- Songs turn naturally towards the bleak or the humorous. The Vitamen write bleaker than Nick Drake and funnier than Richard Pryor in the same line.
WNYU.com
...This prematurely embittered little band the Vitamen, who have now shown off their discomfiting songwriting on two consecutive self-released EPs. Who knows what will become of them? If I were in the neighborhood, I'd go in and try to guess.
Robert Christgau, Village Voice
Not just another CD release party! NYC based trio The Vitamen like to bare their souls and their lyrics show they certainly aren't afraid to tell us whats on their mind.
Paper Magazine
Pulling out the stops, these locals whose records I've enjoyed and whose shows my friends vouch for have hired an 11-piece backing band to celebrate the release of what they regard as their first true albumÑwhich, so stoked are they, will be given away at the gig.
Robert Christgau, Village Voice
The Vitamen, an unsigned three-piece New York band, play uncomplicated, upbeat pop-rock songs with sheepishly sung witty, mopey, often brutally self-deprecating lyrics. They are class purveyors of dork chic.
Thomas Bartlett, Salon.com
CONSUMER GUIDE, HONORABLE MENTION: The Vitamen, Mujer (Vitamen): "Stupid fucking job," the lyric goes ("SFJ," "Black Babies")
Robert Christgau, Village Voice
CONSUMER GUIDE, HONORABLE MENTION: The Vitamen, Fun (Vitamen): cynical, sex-seeking (alt) rockers who aren't getting laid enough ("The Richer My Dad Gets," "1/2 Hard")
Robert Christgau, Village Voice
BEST UNSIGNED BAND OF THE MONTH - THE VITAMEN
Their lyrics are the kind that you might write down in your diary and then bury in your backyard but as you hear them you can't help but smile along with the band and shake your head with a grin like you just heard something that you weren't supposed to. The only difference is that it was witty, funny and absurd all at the same time.
David Lipp, 24/7
From the borough of Brooklyn -- proud of it, not sounding of it -- come The Vitamen; back with their second long-player, Children of the Bear, and I hope you are ready to party, because they sure as hell are.
Eighteen songs and 54 minutes of raucous pop-rock in the vein of Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers or a slightly grittier Sloan, they manage to bring an honest cleverness to a genre of music that doesn't always get props for being overly thoughtful or thought-provoking.
There are a few key themes that run throughout the album's warm, harmony-drenched analog recordings and they're all capable of making your heart race: Haphazard overindulgence ("Happy Birthday", "You're Gonna Pop", "Monster"), struggling with your own mortality as a result of haphazard overindulgence ("Coward", "In A Minute") and the most potentially harmful of all vices, love ("Apologize", "It Takes A Second", "What Have I Done").
An article in New York Magazine's annual music issue recently proclaimed The Vitamen "one of the 16 hot bands changing the soundscape of New York" (in the company of Secret Machines & TV on the Radio). And while they may have had a few laughs and raised a toast to it at the bar, this is a band that deep down could seemingly care less about such arbitrarily meaningless accolades. They are too busy experiencing life and soaking up what matters -- all of its crazy, dysfunctional, yet simple beauty -- fighting through the hangovers and hang-ups to provide us with some seriously smart and super-fun rock & roll songs.
You want this album. You need this album.
"Give me more, more, more, more, more, more, more!"
Gustava Saucedo, Vertical Slum
I can usually tell if an album is going to stand the test of time and be listened to over and over for years to come by one main thing: If the album can be enjoyed with what ever mood I might be in. For example, if the record sounds just as good while I am drinking beers with my friends on a Friday as it does when I am in a crappy mood on a Monday then it is definitely a keeper.
One EP that fits that description, Mujer, was released just last year by an up-and-coming three piece from New York called The Vitamen. This power pop/garage band trio have enough tasty drum beats/bass lines grouped with amazing guitar and vocals to make you select the repeat option on your cd player liberally.
They unabashedly steal from the Kinks "Come Dancing" for the humorous song "Black Babies" and still manage to make it sound like their own. The heart felt ballad "Don't Cry" keeps you wondering what they are going to do next. I hate using other music to describe how a band sounds. But, if I were to do this I would point to early Talking Heads and Modern Lovers. Still there is the track called "You May Not Know" with its rustic sounding horn section, which sounds like it could be an old song by The Band. I also would like to point out that these guys have amazing harmonies both on their recordings and live.
For a truly fun and intelligent batch of songs that will make you say "Oh yeah I love this one!" at least seven times while listening, you should definitely get this EP by the Vitamen.
Matthew Carter, Vertical Slum
The Vitamen - Children Of The Bear
From: New York City, via Larchmont, New York. They might have gotten more hipster-cosmopolitan and less Westchestrian as their recording career has progressed, but their upper middle-class suburban roots still show.
Format: I considered Mujer, the last Vitamen recording, a full-length album. They might not; it's only got seven songs on it and a "clean" version of the last track. Still, it felt like a complete statement to me. Fun, the debut, had something like seven hundred songs on it (and no clean versions), and was definitely a full-length. Children Of The Bear is closer to Fun than it is to Mujer: eighteen tracks, a few of them tiny, all uncensored.
Fidelity: Good. The Vitamen used outside producer Bo Boddie to buff up their songs a little, and he's got The Vitamen sounding like a well-oiled new wave band. They're just as edgy as they've ever been, but this time out there's a little more sparkle to the razorblade.
Genre: Indiepop, Eighties pop/classic pop revival. Actually, I'm not sure if Heartbeat City or Panorama qualify as classics, but they probably ought to. The Vitamen used to be marginally associated with lo-fi, but as I just said, they're pretty fi these days.
Arrangements: No matter how many strings, horns, and synthesizers the Vitamen piled onto the epic songs on Mujer, the core of the compositions remained Jesse Blockton's electric guitar and the band's distinctive three-part harmonies. "You May Not Know" was a gigantic production, but at its heart, it was a Vitamen song like any of the bare-bones pieces on Fun: it built to a guitar workout and a huge bridge where all three groupmembers harmonized together. Ditto for "Stupid Fucking Job" and "Black Babies" -- those were complicated arrangements, but everything in those songs augmented the six-strings and the voices. Children Of The Bear keeps the big productions, but finds the Vitamen drifting from their core, or maybe just opening their sound up further. For instance, inspect the lead track: the big riff is played by horns, and where you might expect some old-fashioned Vitamen harmonizing on the verse, there are female backing vocals instead. Other tracks, like the Casio-pop "Obsessed" or "The Best TV Watchers In The World", are Ocasek-electronic and built around synth arpeggios; there are fewer guitar breaks here than on past Vitamen albums (though those that are here are pretty outrageous). In sum, the outline of the original trio, so sharp on prior recordings, is blurred a little. Children Of The Bear feels less like the vision of three twisted guys and a battery of subordinate friends, and more like the work of an amorphous indiepop collective with Blockton at its helm.
What's this record about?: "I'm untethered," sings Blockton on "What Have I Done" Ð- and for eighteen tracks, he and his bandmates sound it. The Vitamen have never exactly sung songs of freedom, but they've always been keen on the redemptive power of running in circles, or just running away. On Children Of The Bear, they've discovered a hedonistic streak: they're "monsters" when they get their drink on, they're chugging bottles just because they can, they're singing Ôhappy birthday' with willful abandon. Still, there's always something bewildered and misdirected about their excursions into the party-hard lifestyle. "I know what I want/ but every two years I lie in my bed paralyzed/ and after six months I have to start again", sings Blockton, in a moment of late-night analysis, before confessing, broken-voiced, that he's given up everyone he's ever loved. But if there's ever some nobility to be found in retreat and waffling, the Vitamen are there to ferret it out. "Somedays" is the songwriter's dilemma writ large: is the sweat needed to keep the creative process rolling worth the effort? Principally, they don't want the struggle -- they just want to relax and be the best TV watchers in the world, they want to expose the pointlessness of domestic argument on "Apologize", they offer a warning to a romantic overachiever on "You're Gonna Pop". On "Coward", the album's theoretical centerpiece, the trio backs into a political statement, and one of the most accidentally effective topical arguments I've heard in song since the opening of the Bush administration. The narrator is too afraid to fly, and scared shitless in Tel Aviv; he's aware of how ridiculous he looks, but his self-preservation instinct kicks in and he considers his contributions to the world too valuable to sacrifice. "As much as I complain," confesses Blockton, "I love every day". By making cowardice look life-affirming, the Vitamen have simultaneously written an anthem for self-absorbed pacifists, and exposed the ridiculous self-abdegnation behind heroism. Of course I can dig it: I'd never fire a gun in anger, either. Like Blockton, I secretly dig myself too much.
The singer: Also, romantic impermanence is, once again, a major topic under Vita-consideration. But that's true on every Vitamen album -- a thread of interpersonal disappointment runs through all of their songs, and links them all in a continuum of dissatisfaction. Bassist Matt Hyams is the second voice in the band, and his engaging, flatfooted performances of his tales of romantic obsession are, as usual, new wave ear candy. Blockton screams much more than he ever has on Children Of The Bear; at first I found it bothersome, but his gruff approach has grown on me. It seems to correspond to the rougher, more hung-over subject matter. Parts of Mujer sounded like Zappa in its diagnostic and semi-satirical stance; here, Blockton is more Jonathan Sings!-like (on "Problem With America", he even goes back and forth with his backing vocalists a la "The Neighbors"). Drummer Dave Rozner puts his classic rock harmony vox on more prominent display here than he ever has before. The band appends a "bloopers reel" of bad vocal takes to the end of the last track; unlike those you get in Burt Reynolds movies, this one is actually funny, and adds to the group's self-deprecating mystique.
The band: While there are more synths, horns, harmonicas, bells, and whistles on Children Of The Bear than on any prior Vitamen album, Blockton takes some absolutely scalding solos. All are evocative of the best moments of dayglo Eighties music, all are tuneful, and all are distinct from each other. Some might prefer the souped-up, over-the-top leads on "Somedays" and "Monster," but the Talking Heads Naked break on "Apologize" strikes my fruity fancy every time. Hyams and Rozner are less indebted to Eighties pop, and draw from classic rock and new wave in equal measure. Rozner is one of the most creative thinking-man's drummers working in New York -- he pushes to make every measure interesting. They're all spazzes, and that means they're constantly throwing change-ups, worried sick as they are about boring the listener. No chance of that, guys.
The songs: More riff-oriented than their past work. Not just the quasi-heavy "Monster", either; some of the more explicit indiepop numbers are built around synth or guitar patterns, too. "Obsessed", "You're Gonna Pop", "Children Of The Bear" -- these are deviations from the typical "forty chords and an acrobatic melody" style that the Vitamen favored on Fun and Mujer. They're more prone toward shouting one-phrase -- or one-word -- choruses than ever before, too; check the otherwise intricate "Intelligent", for instance. "In A Minute" is a brief, repetitive number that culminates in an unexpected but wholly inspired horn solo. The middle stretch of the album features some truly bizarre experiments (even by the standards of this offbeat band): a French-language Gainsbourgesque number sung by a guest vocalist, the creepy, washed-out, and chromatic "Sleep Dream Die", and the near-Guess Who of "Sky In Her Eyes". But no matter how fragmentary their songs sometimes have been, the Vitamen are superior traditional songwriters. When they step back and craft a production number, like "The Problem With America" or the Bee Gees soundalike "Best TV Watchers In The World", they tend to come up with stuff that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Blockton's pith and unusual use of language is a big part of their indelibility, but it wouldn't matter at all if he and the band weren't such accomplished tunesmiths.
What differentiates this record from others like it? When I first started writing about the Vitamen back in 2001, they were doing shows to crowds of four or five people at the Baggot Inn on weeknights. Their songs were so deliberately unromantic, and their music so self-referentially geeky, that many involved in New York City rock did not believe that they could find a broad audience for their songs. Look at them now: four years later, they've got folks lining up clear to Ludlow Street to catch them at the Mercury Lounge on a Saturday night. They're selling out the best clubs in New York City, and performing to wildly enthusiastic crowds of concertgoers who know the words to all their songs. Now, we're all doing better than we did in '01. But the way the Vitamen got from there to here is pretty special, because they didn't compromise their songs, sound, or style. They never played to audience expectations, they never tempered their nerdiness, they never posed for the cameras or buffed themselves up, they never censored themselves. They're still up there, eyes closed, singing about neuroses and obsessions, staying true to their original uncommercial vision. If they feel like throwing a klezmer section into a song, they do; if they want to throw a French bossa nova in front of a ridiculous rock stomper, that's what happens. The trio asks that you come to them, and that you check your expectations at the bar Ð and their good-faith gamble on the open-mindedness of New Yorkers is now paying off in spades. The Vitamen are proof that if you're talented enough and you stick to your guns, you will find an audience in New York City, and you can communicate sophisticated and troubling ideas. This story couldn't have been written anyplace other than the Big Apple (no, not even San Francisco, you goofs), and that's why it's the greatest city in the world.
What's not so good?: Audiences go crazy for "Monster," Blockton's not-so-ironic party anthem. When he screams about wanting pussy and getting into a fight, the crowd goes wild. Me?, I'm not the crowd. The group chose to record the heartbreaking "What Have I Done" as an acoustic ballad. I've heard the full-band version, and I wish they'd gone that way.
Recommended?: I call it a rich, deep, complex, hilarious, and moving album. I intend to wear my copy out.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Here's the band site. Moreover, the Vitamen recently announced that Children Of The Bear is available at Kim's Video on St. Mark's Place. I remember shopping on St. Mark's for early-Eighties new wave albums. Here's another one, and one just as engrossing as any of those that killed the radio star the first time around.
Tris McCall, NJ.com
THE VITAMEN - MUJER (www.thevitamen.com) Revivalism takes many forms. Some dudes are in love with the ambience and crunch of the guitar on mass-produced seventies rock albums, and go out of their way to replicate that sound. They're sonic classicists, and their music foregrounds its sonic features. Others believe that the classic rock era -- particularly Beatles-inspired groups -- paid an attention to songcraft and composition strategies that since been lost. They pore through books of Big Star sheet music looking for interesting chord shapes and progressions to borrow, and write clinically-perfect hooks into their songs. They're formal classicists, and their music foregrounds its formal features.
Jesse Blockton doesn't have time for any of that. He writes songs that cut straight to the spirit of the classic era. That's not to say the Vitamen ignore sonic and formal features -- particularly not on their somewhat polished new EP Mujer. But Blockton doesn't ever worry about sonic fidelity or the tyranny of the hook; he just presents his stories, figuring that if he can approximate the feel and narrative impact of the Lennon, Fagen and Grateful Dead albums he clearly loves, cultural memory will do the rest of the work for him. It's a great strategy, and not merely because it succeeds. It also has theoretical implications for the function of memory, the purpose of nostalgia, and the value of classicism itself.
On Fun, the jaw-dropping Vitamen debut, Blockton and essential second contributor Matt Hyams established themselves as penetrating and brutally honest chroniclers of urban male neuroses. Writing viciously humorous songs about bad sex, onanism, takeout Chinese, and pretty little secrets, the Vitamen mapped a constellation of embarrasing associations, petty failures and interrelated yearnings common enough to postgraduate endomorphs. If this had been hardcore, or even rap music, the NC-17 subject matter wouldn't have been a cause for commentary. But by telling their outrageous stories over music most reminiscent of American Beauty or All Things Must Pass, the Vitamen confounded expectations and cut to the heart of the classic rock conundrum: people for whom this movement mattered did not grow up to become truckers, or motorcycle gang leaders, or kick-out-the-jams revolutionaries. They moved to the city and took Stupid Fucking Jobs, and while they still cherish their copies of The Dark Side Of The Moon as a point of reference, they no longer imagine themselves as heroic contenders against time, money, and brain damage. By casting the new concerns over the old signifiers The Vitamen squeezed out a record that was received as simultaneously poignant and hilarious. If Fun had been as hi-fi as its sources, it wouldn't have made the emotional resonance it did. It needed to sound like the sketchy memory of scrapped plans for glory, and it needed to salvage humor, self-awareness, and a kind of geeky defiance from that after-the-fact downscaling of expectations.
Mujer is not Fun revisited. For one thing, The Vitamen have cashiered most of their four-letter words (and cheekily responded to critics like me who called them potty-mouthed by including a "clean" version of "Stupid Fucking Job" as a bonus track). The maturing subject matter parallels an accompanying leap in formal songwriting quality and sonic fidelity. This is the best-sounding Vitamen recording I've heard yet, and while I never begrudged them their lo-fi approach, I am glad that the latest material has been handled with a certain amount of care. Because while we weren't looking (or maybe while we were), Blockton has metamorphosed into a superior writer, one who has developed compositional skills worthy of his sources.
"Stupid Fucking Job" and "You May Not Know" sound like Zappa Freak Out reinterpretations of Jerry Garcia and John Lennon, respectively, and while that ought to get your attention right there, they are also such well-built songs that you might not even bother to trace them back to their sources. The former boasts those characteristically off-kilter but welcoming Vitamen harmonies -- many courtesy of drummer Dave Rozner -- that have always served as the group's calling card, while the latter reiterates Fun's willingness to chase big arrangements into tight corners. But Blockton has acquired a new knack for tight song construction, and he now baits melodic hooks as sharp and penetrating as his lyrical ones. Part of Blockton's newly developed skill is his ability to blur the usually stark dividing line (at least among egghead rockers) between text and recorded performance. The first two tracks on Mujer fuse lyrical parallelisms with commensurate musical parallelisms until you feel like you're listening not to a marriage of words and tones, but a total music that flows directly from the rhythm and meaning of the phrases. Lennon used to do that, too.
The masterpiece here, though -- the song that really ought to get Blockton compared to his heroes -- is "Don't Cry", which shares some gravity with the Asia song of the same name, and some immediate vocal I.D. with the better-remembered G'n'R song. Blockton certainly doesn't have the pipes that Axl Rose does, but he compensates with a cracked, Fagenesque delivery that communicates great emotion, wry humour, and tremendous character. For Rose and John Wetton, "don't cry" was something to say to a girl, a command meant to stave off guilt feelings, a kind of preemptive exorcism of unwanted emotion. Blockton feints down that well-travelled road, but then takes the listener on a sharp and moving detour. In the hands of this writer, "Don't Cry" turns out to be a heartbreaking open letter to the narrator's mother. "You've got to find something you like/to start the next part of your life", the son sings tenderly, but with apparent knowledge of the perils of misdirection. The music builds from a catchy riff that's pure Vitamen through a glorious chorus to a barbed and earnest dedication on the outro that has to be heard to be believed. By applying the same brutal honesty to difficult relationships that he did to his examinations of his own behavior, Blockton has taken a step outside postgraduate solipsism, and toward rapproachment with his own surroundings.
It's fitting that for the sophisticated second record, The Vitamen attempt to reclaim some of the grandeur of classic rock, and make it their own. They're still not kidding themselves -- nobody in this milieu is born to be wild, and dreams of the open highway are still fettered by day-to-day difficulties that they're far too honest to sugarcoat. But while so much of Fun attempted to find causes for rueful celebration (or at least commiseration) within the dusty heart of resignation, Mujer is the sound of soulful wiseguys getting the balls to fight back. They've been through the disillusionment, they've learned that the rock and roll fantasies peddled during the classic era don't have much correlative in modern Manhattan, and they took us on that ride last time out. This time, they're surveying the world that's left to them, and devising strategies for moving through it; through the stupid jobs, broken promises, and dashed expectations. On Fun, they earned their self-absorption with their wit, and for Mujer, they earn their release from it with their skill. Sometimes the long and winding road is the trip from thinking about yourself to thinkking about others. One day you merge with that road without even knowing you did.
Tris McCall, Jersey Beat
THE VITAMEN - FUN (www.thevitamen.com) They don't try to overwhelm you sonically. Nobody in this group is addicted to heavy wattage, and frontman and guitarist Jesse Blockton doesn't tend to play big chords, favoring instead the kind of brittle, complicated instrumental parts that will inevitably get this group compared to Steely Dan. No, The Vitamen like to clear space for their lyrics, and since Blockton is also loath to shout, that means pulling back on verses and limiting instrumental monkeying-about. But have no doubt, they're going to get your attention anyway. Three guys singing lines such as "I'm afraid if I lived alone/I would rip all the skin off my dick" and "was every girl on earth molested/or am I just bad in bed?" in tight harmony will tend to accomplish that. Blockton is the Philip Roth of NYC indie rock, a writer grappling with questions about masculinity, urban life, and the relationship between the two, steeped in a classic tradition (in this case, seventies radio rock and singer-songwriters) and completely uninterested in chasing trends. Like Roth, Blockton can be potty-mouthed, but he compensates by spinning surprisingly moving narratives out of occasionally crass threads. It further helps that the group's feel for rock song composition is unquestionably masterful. Fun, their debut, consists of 17 songs recorded cheaply on four-track, presented humbly and without much studio polish. Nevertheless, at least eleven of these ought to permanently penetrate the consciousness of any close listener, particularly the breathy, touching "I Can't Say It", "Dramatic" (I court the horror of the Vitamen by suggesting it sounds like an outtake from Workingman's Dead, but I mean it as the highest complement possible), bassist Matt Hyams's absurdly catchy "Pretty Little Secret" and "Please Show Me The Way", and "The Truth", Blockton's devastating defense of dishonesty. Fun presents the Vitamen's ideas cogently and courageously, allowing their arguments and worldview to unfold at an easily assimilable pace. There may be better locally released full-lengths this year (though I certainly can't think of any), but there won't be any as immediate, coherent, or moving, and those qualities will always trump slick professionalism and the lure of a big sound.
Tris McCall, Jersey Beat
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