Ol' Tony Bones and crew ain't making a reviewers job easy with Viva Le Vox's latest, “Dirt For Sale.” The boys should be applauded for establishing a Frankenstein sound, a conglomeration of ragtime, jazz and punk. This is what makes reviewing it so difficult, as nailing down a reference point to form a basis of comparison in order to give the reader a sense of the sound without using the sense of hearing. Certainly lines of delineation can be found, but they become skewed and cloaked behind some other element in the songs that the connect because. The easiest comparison to make would...
Laundromat patrons, men contemplating their own demise, junkies, lost souls and broken young men: These are the characters that populate the songs of Viva Le Vox, and these are the lives they lead. These glimpses into unseen worlds are set against a backdrop of sleazy Dixieland jazz. In between chopping wood at his brother’s Pennsylvania home, Viva Le Vox songwriter/guitarist/singer Tony Bones tells Buzzbin that early jazz singers, gypsy jazz and old New Orleans funeral marches, along with ’70s punk rock like The Clash, inform the band’s sound. Bones says that when he’s writing s...
