LA indie band, Viva K came in the wake of the death of a Beatle. On the first anniversary of the death of George Harrison, the four musicians who would later become Viva K were spending a typical night drinking at the hipster nightclub, Spaceland. Introduced through mutual friends, the four discovered their mutual admiration for Beatle George Harrison, his music and his role as the first musician to successfully export Eastern influences into modern rock. So what you’d naturally expect from this record is sitars and nasally sprung songs about love and Hare Krishna, right? Wrong. The press release is a red herring. Stinky’s Viva K (a reference to Vivekananda, the first philosopher from India to bring Eastern thought to the West) sidestep the usual conventions of influence and plough head long into an album of noisy electro-punk-rock defined chiefly by cyclic rhythms, rigid tribal beats and banshee-like hollerin’ courtesy of compelling vocalist, Ween Callas. Sounds chaotic? Well it is, but enjoyably so.
True the sitars and the well-presented copies of the Bhagavad-Gita are out in force on the seductive eastern drone of album standout. ‘We Are Safe’ but elsewhere it gets pretty aggressive. ‘Guru’, like ‘Dekoder’ and ‘Does It Matter’, plots a course set by the likes of the Rapture and Radio 4 with a touch of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs thrown in for good measure, and again it’s a mantra-like effort, cyclic, ever so slightly repetitive and hanging interminably on the same few notes. Whilst the Coctueau Twins worked to a similar brief using gorgeously chorused guitars and angelic ethereality, Viva K blend jerky angular stabs, angry distortion pedals and the distressed vocal beehive of Callas to achieve a similar effect. It’s cumulatively disorienting, seductive and hypnotic.
In all fairness, I’ve not been this curious and aroused since 15-year-old Annabella Lwin posed nude in a recreation of Manet’s 1863 ‘Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe’ for Bow Wow Wow’s ‘See Jungle!’ LP in 1981. You can see how interesting my life has been if nothing else.