The Vitamen
Mujer
© 2003 The Vitamen (634479071584)
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Uncomfortably honest, wildly varied, pop rock trio with original arrangements, heavy on the vocal harmonies and melodies.
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The Vitamen is a rock trio from New York City that utilizes a variety of styles & musical forms as frameworks for their sometimes uncomfortably honest lyrics & unusually specific subject matter. Their 2nd album, Mujer, is a stylistic departure from the bare bones arrangements of their first album, Fun, but the added texture and instrumentation of Mujer doesn't detract from the intimacy and spontaneity. The tracks are still all recorded live & roughly "one take", there are just more of them.
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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 2003
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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
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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
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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
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The Vitamen are three awkward guys with sweet, strained vocals playing some killer cynical pop.
Time Out NY
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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
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...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
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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
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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
reviews
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a really refreshing cd
author: ScottThis cd has really really grown on me. I haven't taken it out of my cd changer since I got it.
The maturing subject matter parallels an accompanying leap in formal songwriting
author: Tris McCallRevivalism 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.