Idolator

See, I think Craig Nicholls has been a genius all along, and really only intended to write songs that seem specifically composed to serve as car advertising music or NASCAR telecast bumpers.

Nope, the Vines straight up sucked.

@TheContrarian: Yep. It's science.

Not to sidetrack too much about Donovan, but I was watching DON'T LOOK BACK this weekend as well (on VH1 Classic - your dirty secret is out, Anthony!) and my takeaway from that sequence was quite different. Dylan seems to be heading for a nervous breakdown. He's moving in this constant haze of aggression, rejecting everything with that horrible adolescent superiority of his and tearing himself to pieces; even his sweetest songs had a poison pill at their centers.

Donovan, for all his faults, seems perfectly at ease with himself and with the people around him, and seems to this day to have never had a mean bone in his body. Watching that scene, Donovan's the only one in that room who doesn't come off as an asshole.

@Audif Jackson Winters III: So they were like a garage-rock Moby?

Maybe it was the excessive hype that destroyed them. I prefer to think it's the fact that their first two albums didn't have anything behind their respective first singles. "Get Free" was charming enough but the rest of that first record made me feel ripped off after finding it for $5 in a used bin. Maybe I should have caught on, seeing as that was about a month after it was released.

In short: they sucked. And The Hives blew them off the stage at the MTV awards.

@Jack Fear: Saw it on VH1-Classic, too, which makes my umpteenth (accidental) viewing.

I agree that Donovan doesn't come off too terribly, particularly in the light of Dylan's Divine Douchebaggery.

@TheContrarian:
Their cover of I'M ONLY SLEEPING on the I AM SAM soundtrack was pretty good though.

They had hooks, even a few songs. However, they just weren't very good or compelling. Plus, there was no intellectual or emotional center to what was going on. I can't rememeber a good lyric they wrote and Nichholls was just moaning a spaced out version of another generation's angst anyhow. That said, he can totally start mining 90s nostalgia by the end of the year, especially now that Vampire Weekend has proven that real feeling can afford to be a null quantity in the current indiesphere.

@Jack Fear: My dirty secret is that I've been making the Donovan comparison since the release of Winning Days. And I saw Don't Look Back well before then (before owning a Dylan album, actually).

That dude shouldn't be allowed near a microphone.

I'm just mad about Saffron.

@Mick Kraut: Sigh. Yeah. I suppose it was. But that doesn't forgive their asinine, overproduced, gimmicky "originals."

Did this aforementioned Hype fellow write their terrible, terrible songs?

@RaptorAvatar: "I can't rememeber a good lyric they wrote .."

Aww, come on, I think one of their albums had a track called "Fuck the World" and, separately, a song that featured the line "Fuck the world."

I'm not sure I see the Donovan conncection entirely, but I'll get on board Anthony's bandwagon that the Vines, at least on album one, were far from sucky. That first record's a garage-pop hook-fest, with an interesting post-Britpop sound on a number of tracks that made it stand out from all the Class of '01-'02 "The" bands.

The only trouble is, albums two and three had nothing nearly as catchy and were kind of dull.

They were blown away live by the Hives, and by pretty much every other band of their ilk. But if we're just talking about recorded output, Highly Evolved is a minor (very minor) gem.

@RaptorAvatar: How did I know that this thread would end up being about Vampire Weekend?

And to be fair, we wouldn't have had Riki Tiki Tavi without Rudyard Kipling, not Donovan. Which begs the question - how come no one has ever put "The White Man's Burden" to music?

I'm all for re-evaluation of brushed-off bands, but had to attend some Vines concerts back in my label days and they were easily in the top 5 worst bands I've seen, opening bands and house parties included.

When I hear musicians, I do not expect them to live up to someone else, I just expect them not to repulse me. The Vines failed me, there.

Of course I'm not one to understand the ebb and flow of music: 80s rock left rock inflated and over the top, but the solution everyone seemed to cling on to was Kurt Cobain and assimilating his ethos. Which to me said "what the world wants is to be mundane." Muddy boring music, muddy personalities, muddy tone... muddy.. banks of the wishkah.. It was a time of change, man! people heard that music and thought: I don't have to get a job! I can mumble and feel bad for myself.. by rocking out... to some 90 bpm jams.. about being sad... and stuff.. um..

Yeah, I hope that frames my view of it all and anyone who may put out similar music. I bitch not to say I'm right on this one (as cannot be: opinions/assholes/etc.), but because I think a few more people felt the way I did than they care to admit. The bands that stuck out to me from the 90s were bands that sounded much clearer and interesting: Alice in Chains, STP.. um... STP.. RATM.. they just seemed to (musically only, of course) have their shit together.

The Vines were an okay pop-rock band with a promising debut album that got blown out of proportion by an early decade media hungry for the "Return of Rawk!" trend story (THE strokes! THE hives! THE vines!) that got written over and over and over.

For their part, The Vines didn't help with horrible and dispassionate live performances, second only to their even more disappointing follow-ups.

Most of the blame fell on Craig Nichols' Asperger's diagnosis, but that doesn't explain his bland work since.

And I'm pretty sure The Vines have vowed to never tour again, which may actually help their cause.

I can't WAIT till the Vines set up a transcendental-meditation mecca in partnership with... David O Russell, maybe? That's a toughy.

I was gonna say The Vines sucked and all that but it doesn't seem necesary anymore. Someone even said the thing about the VMAs and The Hives.

@AquaLung: Actually, I would mostly agree with this comment. And I'm the one who defended the first album, above. Well put.

The original version of "Factory" was far and away the best thing they ever did (ripping off Shaun Ryder ripping off Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da), but there's three or four tracks of theirs that still hold up, plus that hilarious Spin interview where the grand profound conclusion is that Craig Nicholls is... Evan Dando??

You know who does suck? The Vines!

You know whose writing is filled with unfounded and unnecessary half-thought out declarations in a floundering attempt to stir up controversy and maybe get more page views? Anthony Miccio!

Someone get rid of this guy and get Jess back to writing regularly. At least his posts made sense, even when I didn't agree with him.

Wow, never made a connection between The Vines and Jesse & the 8th Street Kidz before seeing the picture at the top of this post, but now it all makes sense.

These guys tricked me into liking them for about a month. I saw them at the 9:30 Club on their first go-around and they had OK Go opening up for them. That shit isn't fair...booze and OK Go makes ANYTHING coming afterwads look infinitely better. Especially when OK Go decide to cover the Specials. Lord, that was awful.

To add to the chorus, the Vines were absolutely, positively abysmal live, and I am convinced to this day that Nicholls was trying to piss off the audience intentionally.