Times New Viking - Born Again Revisited [Album]

Matador (released 21 September)

September 15, 2009, 11:55 AM

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There’s lo-fi and then there’s LO-FI. Joining fellow noise-mongers Wavves in the race to make the year’s most distorted pop album here comes Ohio’s Times New Viking. This three piece - guitarist Jared Phillips, drummer Adam Elliott and Beth Murphy on keyboards - are now on their fourth album. “Born Again Revisited” refines (ahem) their sound - heavily distorted 60s garage collides with noisy art-rock shot through with a dash of pop sensibility - but you have to dig deep to mine that pop seam. This is a short album: just over 30 minutes for 15 songs, many only around the 1.50 mark. For many listeners it will remain unhinged, loud, and confrontational and they may never reach the distorted charms within. But there are indeed charms within. Once you get beyond the distortion and the tape hiss and the crackles, it is a record of unbounded joy and great fun.

The (relatively) sedate opener 'Martin Luther King Day' pits short, wiry (Wire-y?) guitar riffs to an organ drone but by the second song you realise this is one of the quieter ones. Next song 'I Smell Bubblegum' is brutal and raw with deranged vocals switching between deep intoning and unhinged chanting over an off-kilter, raucous clamour. It also manages to be great fun in a lunatics-taking-over-the-asylum kind of way and it is a more accurate template for the rest of the album in which Times New Viking manage to pull off the trick that Nuggets-era 60s garage-rockers pulled off - filtering familiar formats into something less slick, more primitive but also thrilling, vital and with a palpable sense of fun. The album continues to mix fuzzy guitars, droning organs and alternating boy-girl vocals to create a whole that is a surreal, smart and joyously ramshackle, with all the warts left in: tape hiss, sludge, distortion to name just a few. There are some slower songs that are more melodic such as 'No Time, No Hope' and '2/11 Don’t Forget' - the former an organ and guitar chug, the latter a twanging psychedelic shuffle with freaky swirling vocals - but all is relative. 'These Days' comes with faux-naif, off-key singing in the style of Daniel Johnston over the most stripped back guitars and drums on the album. But these moments are a perfect counterpoint to the shock-and-awe noise on offer elsewhere and are some of my favourite on the album.

This is undoubtedly a Marmite record – you will either love it or hate. Some listeners will not get past the first or second song. Some listeners who do, will weary of the constant noisy aggression and ear-bending distortion but others - and I count myself amongst them - will find surprising amounts of variety and inventiveness packed into such a short album. The final song is 'Take The Piss' which is all playground-punk shouting over amateurishly beaten rhythms. It is over in 30 seconds. Some people will agree: Times New Viking are just taking the piss. Me, I think in “Born Again Revisited,” Times New Viking have made one of the underground albums of the year.

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