CD Review: ViV

For all of you music connoisseurs out there in the sea, here’s some tasty bait for your lines. This band is bound to hook you for good! After listening to ViV’s newest album, “Flawed,” I felt incredibly full and uplifted. ViV’s music is energizing, familiar, and extremely catchy. Their sound can be categorized most accurately as indie rock, but they definitely mix a variety of different genres into their music. Like a bubble gum Beta Band, with the laid back feel of Guster and the radio friendliness of U2 hits, ViV is a band with mass appeal. These guys are upcoming and fresh. They are an excellent addition to a record collection, regardless of what kind of music you prefer. As said by musical legends Bonnie Hayes, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, Adam Ant, and David Crosby, “ViV’s songs manage to be hooky catchy without being obvious, emotional without being sentimental. I really like this record!” The instrumentation on “Flawed,” released summer of 2004, is original, but not so eclectic that it becomes distracting from the downbeat melody lines and head rocking drum and bass grooves. They have a vintage feel to them. It’s as if they have been the snippet of song you have been waking up to on your radio alarm every morning since you were 10-oddly familiar. As The San Jose Mercury News says, “The mark of a great pop band is when a song you’ve never heard sounds instantly familiar, like some old hit you’ve missed. ViV fired off one after another. The group had the aura of a young U2, Radiohead, or Coldplay. The audience knew it too.” So who is ViV? The band consists of singer/songwriter Matt Ostrander, Steve Bowman (Counting Crows, Third Eye Blind) on drums, keyboardist Justin Dobrin, Mike Fiorentino on violin, mandolin, and guitar, and Erik Semo as the bass and vocalist. Combined, they create a blend that is rich with emotion, light on the ears, and deep with influence of American and British rock. You can catch this band September 30th at 9:30pm in the HUB Courtroom at PSU. If you are interested in seeing more of their shows, they also have an upcoming show at Chester college in Manchester on October 4th. For more tour dates and all things ViV, check out their website at www.vivtheband.com.