At long last: your chance to see Vietnam! No, not the Vietnam of Apocalypse Now, but Brooklyn’s Vietnam, which will be bringing its off-kilter brand of “apocalyptic street blues” to the Hanoi Hilton–er, make that the Rock & Roll Hotel–on Friday, April 19.
Vietnam has been MIA for six years, during which time chief songwriter and vocalist Michael Gerner turned his attention from rock to ambient analog synth music, presumably because he longed for more musical boredom in his life. But now Vietnam is back with a characteristically offbeat new album, an A.merican D.ream and a brand new single “Kitchen Kongas,” which is so great it can’t resist giving itself a round of applause at the end.
Applause notwithstanding, Vietnam isn’t an easy band to love, at least on first listen. Over the course of two LPs and one EP Vietnam has played an idiosyncratic and defiantly unpolished combination of rock, blues, soul, and ambient music, over which Gerner tosses off gems of Dylanesque poetry. In this respect Vietnam is a throwback to that Magical Mystery Blip known as the Age of Aquarius, when hirsute hippies such as the Kozmic Blues Band mixed genres as casually as they mixed drugs.
As for an A.merican D.ream, I’ll be the first to admit I disliked it at first. But I’ve come to enjoy it, thanks largely to such songs as the slow, beautiful “Stucco Roofs,” the catchy “Kitchen Kongas,” and the moody but curiously addictive “Yaz,” which boasts a divine chorus (“Yaz, you are so beautiful/You are a New York star”) and closes in a drawn-out ambient haze.
In short, if your tastes run to the musically adventurous, here’s your chance to check out a band that sounds like absolutely nobody else. So get your ass down to the Rock & Roll Hotel to shout out a request for “Apocalypse,” although that’s a dicey proposition given that Vietnam has inexplicably seen fit to release two completely different songs with that title.
So perhaps you ought to call out a request for “Priest, Poet & The Pig” or “Welcome to My Room” instead. They both rock balls!
