The Vivids, composed of lead singer/guitarist Sim Jackson, live aspects Jonny Yela (bass) and Gustov Mentzer (drums) formed in Long Beach, California ("...this drugged up beach side town," as Jackson sings in "Here Comes the Chain" from their first E.P.) in 2010. They play with an energy and focus that recall post-/art-punk touchstones like A Certiain Ratio, The Names, Wall of Voodoo, Gun Club or Devo and the Talking Heads at their edgiest, while flirting with psychedelic guitar leads and the occasional surf warble.

Imagine Martin Hannett producing the Ventures or the deepest cuts from Factory Records poured through a filter of shoegaze and hard-luck street punk. This is not the sunshiny day music of coastal contemporaries Best Coast or Wavves; it's music that floats through dingy, smoky beach flat apartments and simultaneously unnerves as it soothes, the washes of guitar grounded by the metronomic rhythm section, coming on like the very beginning of a particularly intense trip as your stomach churns a bit in anticipation of an unknown soon to be revealed and leaving with the low menace of the rumbling ocean outside as you try to fall asleep on a pile of sheets on the floor.

--- Tom Child (LA Record)