Skip to main contentWhen Viva Voce named its new album Rose City—after its driving anthem of the same name—the band wasn't trying to confirm the utopian image outsiders often have of Portland. "It's meant to be more of a nude painting than a love song about the town," Voce's Kevin Robinson says, breaking off a piece of bacon at Northeast Portland's Cup Saucer Cafe. The song's lyrics prove his point: "I wanna go back where the rain won't stop/ And the trees run wild like killer cops." The tune was originally dreamed up as "Razorblade City," a nickname continually dropped on hip-hop trio Lifesavas' 2007 album, Gutterfly. "The original lyrics had lines about needle girls and stuff," Robinson says. "It was a little more dark."
Despite its nod to the town's dark side, the recorded version of "Rose City" is unabashed in its love for Portland. That's a pretty accurate take on Kevin and his bandmate/wife Anita Robinson's own relationship with the city as well. "It's the only time I've felt like I could take a town for the good and the bad and enjoy it for what it is," says Kevin, who spent his childhood moving throughout the South and Midwest. Anita—who still speaks with a hint of Southern twang from growing up in Decatur, Ala.—feels that same love. "It's the first place I've lived where I didn't have a sense of restlessness," she says.
When they moved to Portland from Alabama eight years ago, Kevin and Anita saw a town where people lived out their dreams. The couple, then performing as a duo after stints with low-commitment third members, were already a few years into living their own dream as a touring indie-rock band. Anita compares the marriage/band combo to running a farm. "To me, it's that hardcore. It's such an intense lifestyle. You feel such love and attachment to what you're doing...but at the same time it can be really hard sometimes, because so much of it is out of your hands."
In its eight years in Portland, Viva Voce has released four full-lengths and toured extensively. After forming psychedelic Americana side project Blue Giant last year, the Robinsons realized just how tired they'd become of playing duo shows, which couldn't re-create Viva Voce's adventurous album sound. So they expanded the group to a four-piece, with Kevin moving to bass, Swords Project's Evan Railton on drums and longtime Portland singer-songwriter Corrina Repp on guitar and keyboards. Viva Voce's current shows replace the old duo configuration's immediacy with a more layered, slightly darker sound. Repp adds vocal and musical harmonies while Kevin—who says he feels liberated being out from behind the drumset—can focus more on his own singing and on connecting with the audience.
On record, though, Viva Voce is still Kevin and Anita playing pretty much everything, and recording in the studio they built in their Northeast Portland back yard. Most of the band's songs aren't as straightforward or anthemic as "Rose City"—the duo built its reputation on sweeping psychedelic epics like "Brightest Part of Everyone" from 2003's Lovers, Lead the Way and squealing, trippy love songs like "When Planets Collide" from 2006's Get Yr Blood Sucked Out. But it's VV's pop sensibility—and hints of the stadium rock that fills some of Anita's earliest childhood memories—that makes up the center of even the band's most elaborately decorated songs (see "Alive With Pleasure," from 2004's The Heat Can Melt Your Brain, a mini rock opera unto itself).
Rose City is its own animal entirely. The Robinsons put a time restriction on their recording sessions, using three weeks last winter—while snow dumped over Portland—to write, revise and record the album. The result is a stylistic step back: Whereas VV's previous album, Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, often seemed buried under its own production ideas, Rose City rides clean melodies and infectious little sonic hooks, from the My Bloody Valentine-style tape loops on "Devotion" to the pogo-stick drums of "Octavio." And while the album is similar in spirit to the bad's previous high-water mark, The Heat Can Melt Your Brain, Rose City feels looser, more confident and intent on rocking. Kevin chalks up the confidence to experience in the studio. "On the other records I can hear a learning curve," he says of learning the tricks of the trade. "This one feels like we got something down in the moment."
It's a shining moment for Viva Voce and, by proxy, for its hometown.
comes out Tuesday, May 26.
WWeek 2015
