Concert Review

Recently, I've been buttonholing everybody I know and telling them about Viva Voce, the indie-rock husband/wife duo of Kevin and Anita Robinson.\nThey played at Second Story Monday night and I think it was the best show around that no one went to, besides 20 some people, half of whom performed for the openers.\nPrizzy Prizzy Please opened first. The local sax/guitar/drums foursome, featuring Mark Pallnan's's freak-out sax-playing and screechy falsetto, humorously performed numbers about animals, indoor kids, privates and Ron Artest. After a solid showing they ended, to everyone's amusement, with Will Smith's "Just the Two of Us."\nNext up, Montreal's all-femme outfit Pony Up!, who put on a playful set that you could roll your hips to. It included only one song from their hard-to-listen-to 21-minute, 7-song debut EP — by all means, a step in the right direction.\nViva Voce, which translates from Italian to "by word of mouth," opened with "Alive with Pleasure," a single fit for the charts. Anita came in with fuzz-driven riffs on her Danelectro baritone guitar and Kevin got the rest rolling with a bracing rhythmic backbeat. They both "hoo-hoo-ed" a chorus until the song strayed into a dreamy segue a la the Fiery Furnaces and then did a refrain of the beginning. \nViva Voce played an array of other tracks, mostly from their latest album The Heat Can Melt Your Brain, including their second single "The Center of the Universe," a Pink Floyd-esque chill-out odyssey. They occasionally used a beat machine for added ambiance. \nDespite the fact that their albums were recorded in their Portland, Ore. home, Viva Voce's sound has the production quality of a Stereolab or Zero7 album. You've never heard of them before because they're fiercely independent; however, you may've heard their music ("Lesson No. 1," a cheery hand-clapper, has been played on "The OC").\nKevin and Anita told me before the show that, being over here until their summer tour in Germany, their success abroad doesn't even feel very real at the moment because they're used to small gigs here. Seeing this exceedingly talented couple play a dead Bloomington bar on a Monday night didn't feel real to me, either.