The Vivian Girls – Share the Joy

There’s not enough mathematical analysis in music reviews, is there? Shame – a wee bit of number crunching can be insightful. For instance, take the average track lengths of The Vivian Girls albums to date: approximately two minutes on their debut, two and a half on its successor, and now another thirty seconds added on their third.

Seems they’re growing up and out, flexing their song-writing talents further with every release. Get closer, and you discover Share the Joy’s data is skewed by the six-minute outliers that top and tail the album. In a sense, they’re atypical, with Dance (If You Wanna) and Take It As It Comes elsewhere consolidating the charm and fuzz-pop Spector-echoes that have long constituted the band’s sound. But they also reveal a more ambitious side to the Brooklyn trio; cut from the same cloth as their scrappier past, but, to mix metaphors, mining new seams. [Chris Buckle]