Album review: SPICE – Viv

Anyone who’s battled through depression will know how ugly it can get. The experimental SPICE aren’t sugar coating that on their second album, Viv. Known for making music on addiction, break-ups and breakdowns, the album continues to offer honesty and upfrontness on the realities of mental illness and that getting better is hard work.

Opener Recovery gives us lyrics that could be taken straight from a therapy session. ‘You sacrifice perfect days,’ ‘You have to get out of bed and it’s hard’. It’s both poetic yet painfully open, rehab in musical form. Ashes In The Birdbath explores grief and loss, it's dizzy, sickly and bittersweet in a beautiful way, with instrumentation that stays incognito of its sadness. Besides the emotive strings it dances and swells with a relatively colourful guitar riff. It also hosts some of the most intricately, soul-wrenching lyricism: ‘Some of my friends they keep dying on me over and again, but I saw a sky so beautiful I believed in hope over despair’.

It’s not all gloomy, though. Musically, Viv intertwines flavours of shoegaze, '90s grunge, and the vocals of Ross Farrar are nuanced with '00s-style angst. Stomping bass work and pop-punk drumming give this album a drive that makes you scrunch your nose in appreciation, yet the addition of Victoria Skudlarek’s sorrowful violin torments the scorching guitar in a way that makes SPICE feel truly phenomenal.

For those hungry for something different, Viv will leave you feeling full. This record is a body of work that showcases some of the most crafted and clever songwriting we have in today’s music. Rock has rarely sounded so understanding.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Fugazi, Microwave, Teenage Wrist

Viv is out now via Dais Records