"His & Her Vanities tumbles and screeches into cleverly bent-up pop that shows a clear love for the jarring sounds of Brainiac and Enon. Most of HHV’s tunes, though, keep it a bit more sweet and catchy, not getting overly caught up in mechanical new-wave weirdness. That's especially true of the band's new third album, 'The Mighty Lunge.' It took five years of on-and-off work to complete, mostly because band founders Ricky and Terrin Riemer were busy raising their kids and putting out other Madison artists' work through their Science Of Sound label. The wait pays off emotionally in some of the band's most direct, accessible, and warm songs to date.
-The Onion A.V. Club
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Some albums make me think of cinema while still others remind me of loosely edited anthology collections. To follow this cultural artifact metaphorical trend, the latest effort by Madison, Wisconsin’s His and Her Vanities is a novella, a picture pretty work of hopeless anxiety. Trim as can be, The Mighty Lunge gets a lot of angst-inducing uncertainty into its 29 1/2 minutes, a testament as much to the coherent and singular thematic focus of the album as to band principals (and married duo) Ricky and Terrin Riemer’s handiness with crafting compact, to-the-point-and-no-further songs.

This atmosphere of frustrated and even fearful directionless is particularly noticeable in songs like “Hits Like Hail,” “Wait It Out,” and “New Designs.” In “Hits Like Hail,” Riemer plaintively croons over a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah-esque background about fruitlessness and apparent impending doom, while on “Wait It Out” the narrator appears to be some sort of metaphysical refugee with no clear path down which to trod.

Lest all this sound like so much overwrought emo nonsense, the genius of the record is found in the dissonant pairing between the lyrics and the music. While Ricky Riemer’s lead vocals belt out the downtrodden narratives in a way that is slightly more upbeat than you’d expect from the message being evoked, the instumental accompaniment is positively giddy. A relaxed and somewhat poppy post-punk, Mr. Riemer and bandmate Matt Ablanalp wield guitars in a manner you’d expect from on a Pixies release recorded midway through a low-grade treatment of zoloft. Simultaneously, Mrs. Riemer and drummer Sara Quigle anchor a rhythm section that brings to mind a more disciplined Sonic Youth. By and large, the album sounds upbeat even as it speaks of morose notions, though on tracks like “What it is,” “Agenda,” and “Fuses” (and, to a lesser extent ,”Fragments”) find the rock about as dark as the rhetoric. Though, in the final analysis, not quite.
- Citizen Dick
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"His & Her Vanities: the Madison quartet with a John & Yoko temperament, minus the flashbulbs and body hair. These husband-and-wife fronted rockers steal weirdo-wedlock designs from Jack White, though Ricky and Terrin Riemer have a style of their own to flaunt, adding a crest of personalised hell to their billowing pop-rock throwers."
-CokeMachineGlow
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Madison, WI quartet, His & Her Vanities release their third album, "The Mighty Lunge" via the Science of Sound record label. Generally Science of Sound's bands are artsy rock bands, but His & Her Vanities break the mold. Their variety of raw, energetic pop is reminiscent of bands like the Pixies or the Apples in Stereo. The giddiness of the band can be explained by the band's core, married couple Ricky and Terrin Riemer. Married bands like Mates of State and the Rosebuds have proven that married couples make some of the most joyous music possible. His and Her Vanities is no different. The album's opening track "Hits Like Hail" is an extremely danceable track featuring Interpol-esque guitar work, if Interpol wrote in major keys. The vocals of Ricky Riemer are a combination of yowls and clumsily sung tunes similar to Doug Martsch of Built to Spill or Michael Pace from Oxford Collapse. While some tracks go more into the wall-of-sound territory, the songs never lose their pop base. That base really makes this one of the best Wisconsin albums I have heard since Boris the Sprinkler broke up.
-Surviving the Golden Age