s the four members of the Brooklyn rock band VietNam sit on the worn, flower-patterned furniture that lines the Cat’s Cradle’s upstairs loft—excitedly toasting a hitch-less, just-completed performance and a superb, just-released album—the mini-fridge in Evan Dando’s vacant dressing room is being raided. The celebration, having started heartily a few hours ago, leaves small reason for the guys to stick around for the Lemonheads, whom VietNam is opening for on a nation-wide tour, to start their by-numbers performance. As the band’s wiry, candid co-founder, Joshua Grubb, is fond of saying that would not be very rock ‘n’ roll. Continuing an evening that has detoured from that anti-coda with a pleasurable succession of: Chimays, Greyhounds, complimentary Buds, Dando’s filched Coronas, a J or two and some Xanax—to the fretting of their now-former tour manager (yes, he had a beard)—we leave Chapel Hill’s legendary rock venue for late night libations at the Orange County Social Club.

Perhaps it was an over-compensating attempt to soar with rock’s current bona fide eagles of hooliganism. Maybe it was sleep deprivation from an eventless drive from eventless Florida, or the sentient curse of some girl’s iron deficiency. Maybe VietNam’s music simply commands its listeners to get trashed. The night was forced a little short, when, after pissing in a plant and all over a bouncer’s shoes, a friend and I ended up blinded by flashing cop lights. As I blurted to a semi-proud officer and his partner that he was indeed the “real deal doppelganger of Hollywood enforcer Troy Evans,” a blood-red bruise, in the shape of the freakiest kidney bean from the kookiest farmer’s dreams, formed below my ribs.

wo hours before VietNam takes the stage, Josh Grubb and I leave the Cradle and walk across Main Street to an agreeable bar called Milltown. He’s awaiting a call from a porno magazine that wants to interview him about “outdoor survival.” He doesn’t know either. Besides the fact that he’s less hirsute, this is not the same shade of fire-eyed musician I hung out with in the Bowery a few years ago; the one who likes to “whip bottles” and once stormed from the stage of the Hiro Ballroom mid-performance to fight an also-ran hipster band. Back then, VietNam’s bassist Ivan Berko, who now appears, along with drummer Michael Foss, bound by the blood of camaraderie and grooming, hadn’t yet joined. Back in 2004, Josh Grubb and Michael Gerner’s original incarnation of VietNam was noted for being the only band—the only true blue rock band at that—on a newly formed VICE Records with a mere EP. They were the ideal embodiment of that nubile label: risky, scary and real on the other side.

When they were abruptly let go during a tour with Panthers and Death From Above 1979 for overindulging—“Both of the bands on that VICE tour were nothing but nerds and they we’re always asking us ‘How do you guys do it nightafter night?’”—the ironic reality was Scanners to a lot of hipsters’ heads. Left unsigned in the years following, to listeners in and outside their Brooklyn home, their future was uneasy and unclear. Now, three years later, as he sips from a Greyhound, Grubb is fond of a colorful boast that he still likes to recite. “Man, there all of these people asking us stuff, like if we had a drug budget [for recording the album]. And I’m like, of course we did, we still have one. We’re rock ‘n’ roll.” That party line wouldn’t mean a thing if VietNam hadn’t released the year’s best rock album, a bellwether of the times. Grubb fully grasps the relief and forthcoming reward in their redemption.

The music on VietNam’s self-titled album is poignant. The album is crafted with rueful, cavalier lyricism and music liberated by traditional and immediate rock and blues that would cause the songs to scorch if their rooms, streets and lone parable weren’t awash in the onset of dusk. Compared to their demo-esque EP, The Concrete’s Always Grayer on the Other Side of the Street, the only aspect of their music not recharged and fleshed out is vocalist Michael Gerner’s urban poet delivery. Often compared, sincerely and occasionally snidely, to Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, his every word is audible, concise and intelligible against even the band’s most free-throttling riffage. His voice is a half-bark half-brace, and it puts direct focus on songwriting—recalling the beatific ‘60s and ‘70s—at a time when most rock bands trendily drone it out with dance beats or noise, half-ass it or expend meaningful lyrics for the sacred hook. Because of this, you can quote each of the album’s 10 highly memorable songs, live in them and discuss them sans awkward attempts at ‘you know…that one’ to friends.

It is true that the current concatenating litany of references being latched to VietNam, including the band’s others (Canned Heat, the Everly Brothers) and their press kit’s, which drops Spiritualized and the remerging demon don of psychedelic rock, Roky Erickson, fails to categorize the band’s sound and significance. This failure is mainly due to the context of their timing. That they released their debut album during a year that is just another pulsing with caustic terror images that arrive muted in the triviality and confusion of traditional and digital media, does not lend subtlety to the band’s incoming style. With limp parallels to 1969 on the news and paisley nostalgia grabbing and swirling in popular culture—fuck, even Lindsay Lohan has a movie entitled Hippy on her wet deck—pegging the band as derivative, music-unheard, is cake.

Given, the group’s name, cherry-picked from the garden of their native Texas after their first three-syllable choice, Suicide, was taken, is confrontational, if not premeditated. So be it. If this is the direction that a youth culture tired of shilling dance party flyers and talking up deejays is going to take, better a band akin to nihilistic, outlaw country greats like Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings do it right, than the ones that will inevitably follow to stage mock acid tests. On the gracious tab of Mickey Madden from Maroon5, VietNam recorded much of their album at Los Angeles’ historical Sound City Studios (Willie Nelson, Fleetwood Mac), with concurrent breaks poolside at Hollywood’s affordable Highland Gardens Hotel—the site of Janis Joplin’s smack overdose. As if to further solidify that they see and wear their affinity for this wedge of rock’s past, Grubb has “Pale Blue Eyes,” a song off the Velvets’ 1969 self-titled album, inked across his neck. They’re through and through; what Kings of Leon posture as in lad mags, including Jann Wenner’s: a figurative hand holding Ultragrrrl’s head underwater.

There are political undertones on the album. On the opener, “Step on Inside” a line goes, “So the headlines read ‘Coffins coming home,’ you know they’re sent U.S. Fed-Ex. And man, these visions bloom inside my room, inside my head,” and seconds later, “They all follow the leader and lost who was leading and they never knew their way.” The latter line puts a spin on Raoul Duke’s famous sentiment on the tunnel-vision followers of Timothy Leary. As the song, “Apocalypse” attests, this is not peace or protest music. If there’s a lyric that can sum up the album’s rebellious mores it’s via Rotten Apple rapper Prodigy and his recent stunner, “Mac 10 Handle”: “I sit alone in my dirty ass room staring at candles, high on drugs.”

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