The Michigan band’s debut defaults to the moody rumble of 1990s shoegaze, but sounds best when it plows through the guardrails.
Ann Arbor, Michigan quartet Big Vic recognize the undeniable correlation between loud music and emotional expulsion. Singer, main songwriter, and lead guitarist Victoria Rinaldi is quite comfortable tearing up her strings on the band’s debut Girl, Buried—yet her voice rarely rises above a whisper. Rather than shout, Rinaldi hangs back from the mic and shreds, hiding pithy observations within the heady squall of her bandmates: guitarist Geoff Brown, bassist Ines Hidalgo, and drummer Joe Fortino.
The four friends met at the University of Michigan, where Rinaldi studied multi-disciplinary visual art. She’d begun writing songs in high school, and as an Asian American, she was disheartened by the lack of diversity she saw within heavier music scenes. The success of rock artists like Mitski helped inspire her to shift the balance. Big Vic is her first proper band, and the nine-track Girl, Buried is powered by the moody rumble of 1990s shoegaze—a default setting that sometimes holds the album back. The band’s reverence for groups like Slowdive and Sonic Youth is earnest and precisely rendered, but Big Vic sound best when they get lost in their own clamor.
Lyrically, Girl, Buried is lean. Rinaldi isn’t the type of frontperson who occupies a large, ego-driven space, and her voice never pulls you away from the energy of her band. On “Broken Car,” her languor serves a narrative about depression and inertia: “Spent the last three weeks in bed/Haven’t left this house in days,” she murmurs. When she finally gathers the strength to leave town, her car won’t start. She doesn’t shout or bang her fist on the dashboard; she simply climbs out of the driver’s seat and wanders off, sounding more exhausted than ever. As the drums and bass fall away, she scrapes the length of her fretboard. Its descending metallic croak is the only indication of catharsis.
Rinaldi often downplays her voice, allowing her instrument and those of the band to land the emotional punch. On the frenzied late album track “Worms,” technically her most verbose entry, Rinaldi’s words are so buried in the mix that they’re largely indecipherable. When the occasional phrase emerges (“Her eyes turned red, the anger bubbling up”), it’s effectively smothered by Fortino’s big plastic toms and Hidalgo’s rubbery bass. The layers of sound—grimy distortion, shrieking feedback—pile on top of Rinaldi’s vocal like heaps of earth. By the end of the song, the noise engulfs her. She’s slightly more audible on the sprawling closer “Anymore,” but she pares her lyrics back to just two lines: “I don’t really care if you come down anymore,” she sings. “Truth is, I don’t love you or miss you anymore.” She mouths the words softly at first, gradually cutting deeper as she dials up the volume. The shift is incremental and then exponential: The song culminates with a shouting fit rivaled only by the screech of her guitar.
Big Vic are measured, steering carefully between softness and sonic heft. The balance lends their music dimension, but they sound best when they plow through the guardrails. They’re delightfully unhinged on “Gun Girl,” a clipped, two-and-a-half minute track propelled by sharp, uneven planes of guitar and Rinaldi’s wry delivery, not unlike Kim Gordon’s trademark snarl. “I feel his unwelcome eyes all the time,” she deadpans. “More and more I want to see his insides.” As she mumbles that unnerving line, she rips into a shrill, blood-curdling solo, disemboweling the creep with her instrument. A squawking saxophone, perhaps the best surprise on the album, leaps in at the last minute to join the action. Big Vic thrive in this kind of chaos—like a swirl of limbs in a Looney Tunes brawl, it is simultaneously joyful and ferocious.
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