When Brooklyn's fuzz-pop queens Vivian Girls bring their grungy West Coast surf and girl-group sound to the desert, lead singer Cassie Ramone will probably utter her lyrics with the disaffected look of someone simultaneously bored and saddened by the fact that she has to be singing at all.

That's how she does it, but the momentum of the songs' melodies forces her to continue, and this tension is magnetic. The threesome, on L.A.'s In the Red Records, offers infectiously sloppy pop that slithers and slides coolly around choruses and breaks, rising and crashing like high tide. The band's debut is a jangly mess of harmonizing guitar slop with a dash of '90s grunge punk thrown in for good measure.

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