Uptime! is the fourth album released by DTCV, following a cassette debut, a double album follow-up, and an early material compilation. The band has already burned through a career’s worth of releases in a scant four years. This new album comes with a tour documentary download, but said documentary is also available on limited edition VHS. As someone who grew up in the late-‘80s and early-‘90s, I find the current fuzzy nostalgia for tape-based media aggravating simply because I remember the actual quality level of that media when it was the general standard. Oh, and they’re a duo that go by the pseudonyms “Vivarock” and “Fiat Lux” and pronounce their band name “Detective”. Sheesh! Fortunately for DTCV, I didn’t discover any of this background information before listening extensively to Uptime!, so the rest of this review will focus on the music, and not the band’s presentation quirks.
Lead singer Vivarock’s (Guylaine Vivarat) vocals are very strong, although Fiat Lux’s (James Greer) handful of turns on the mic provide decent changes of pace for the band. Vivarat’s voice is by turns smoky and coquettish, and it has a lot of personality. This, it turns out, is the band’s saving grace, because the songwriting on Uptime! leaves a lot to be desired. DTCV exists in a musical zone that a lot of third-tier indie rock acts fall into. They rock, but without enough of an edge to be punk. Their songs are melody-focused, but not catchy enough to be considered hooky. There are some guitar riffs, but nothing bracing or memorable enough to fit the post-punk label. This leaves the band in a morass where what they do is listenable and competent, but not exactly good.
The album’s second track, “X-Water”, is a good example. It has a decent chorus with a catchy guitar riff and mostly wordless but reasonably catchy “Ah aaahh ahh” vocals from Vivarat. The song ends with a different, chunkier riff and it’s a reasonably creative musical move. But once it’s over “X-Water” just sort of drifts away from the listener’s mind until the next time it’s heard. Album closer “Radio Drive” illustrates a different problem for DTCV. It features Vivarat and Greer dueting on vocals over a driving bass and drums part. It should be a strong rocker that ends the album with a bang. But Vivarat matches Greer’s low-key delivery and it sucks some of the energy out of the song. The lackluster refrain “Digging the sound on a radio drive” barely changes the melody from the verses, and that takes care of the rest of the energy. So we’re left with a song with a powerful bass and drum part that is completely nullified by the vocal performance and lazy melody.
When Greer and Vivarat find an appropriate musical accompaniment for Vivarat’s vocals, it makes a big difference. The album centerpiece, “It’s a Stealer”, is relatively standard musically. There’s lightly chugging guitar, a slightly melodic bassline, and a more interesting than usual drum part. But the vocal melody lets Vivarat use her range, and she goes from low, smoky verses to wordless coos. Musically, the song changes in the middle to a syncopated feel and then a driving finish. But it’s all in service to Vivarat and the melody, which even hits a ‘60s girl group feel in that final, driving section of the song. It a distinctive track that takes full advantage of the band’s greatest asset and pays off better than anything else on the record.
Elsewhere the band flailingly attempts to demonstrate its sense of humor. “Invitation to a Beheading” is just under three minutes of Greer’s monotone-style singing in which he strings together a bunch of phrases that he apparently thought were clever or interesting. “I saw Satan fall like lightning” goes the oft-repeated refrain, in addition to lines like “Nothing inside but an alpine silence / We were at home watching History of Violence” and “Cemetery mailboxes / Serviced by postal ghosts.” The lyrics to the songs “Miley Cyrus Wins the Race” and “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Song” have nothing to do with their titles, which reduces them to the musical equivalent of a joke in one of those Friedberger/Seltzer Meet the Spartans-type movies, where the entire gag is essentially “Hey, Miley Cyrus and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame are famous things we have heard of!”
James Greer has had a long and varied career, including being a Senior Editor at Spin magazine in the early ‘90s and playing bass for Guided By Voices for a couple of years in the mid-‘90s. He’s also written a couple of well-regarded novels, a biography of Guided By Voices, and a handful of hacky Hollywood screenplays (including Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector and the latter-era Jackie Chan movie The Spy Next Door) in the ‘00s. If anything, Uptime! is another item on his resumé that, like the screenplays, inadvertently makes the case for Greer as an author. Most of the band’s oomph comes from Vivarat’s vocals, and even those are sometimes muted by the half-hearted songwriting.