Times New Viking – Rip It Off Review
Some labels are bigger than others and for a band wanting to advance beyond their humble origins, the option to leapfrog from label to label up the musical food chain while evolving into a more streamlined, fully-functional hit making music machine must be a lot more tempting than spending an eternity repeatedly regurgitating your sound and being stuck in the back of a tour bus that never ever stops. But let us thank the holy ghost of Elvis in his Las Vegas heaven that this isn’t the desired route of every band on this overcrowded planet. Although, some bands still move to other more shiny record labels and if you weren’t paying attention you probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.
Rip it Off is Times New Viking’s third album and their first release on the Matador label, the grooming den of a multitude of pristine indie outfits. So has the loud distorted guitar rattle of Times New Viking been replaced with an anti-hiss big studio glossy veneer? Well, erm… no. There are no sounds here that indicate this recording was done with any of the gee-wiz-bang trickery of modern recording techniques. “Teen Drama” starts the album with chunky riffs, wonky keyboards and hoarse voices and each song arrives in the same format, barely lasting for more than two or three minutes, like short bursts of teenage adrenaline that sound as if they were recorded live with a portable tape recorder. On Rip it Off, Times New Viking are as raucous and dishevelled as they’ve always been and even seem to have produced a record that isn’t too dissimilar to their previous release on a much smaller label.
Such apparent methods of minimal production and a din of a punky racket may seem prosaic and disingenuous, when considering the band’s newfound resources, but such considerations are missing the point. This album may be a little overlong and hardly an original concept as a whole, but individual songs like “Drop-Out” and “Come Together” clang around in your head in a very pleasurable way, even “End of All Things” with its quiet acoustic section is surprising and seems almost unsettling amongst an ever-present ridiculous clatter. The songs may be ridiculous (in a good way) but hidden underneath the layers of dirty distortion there are great little yelping colourful pop numbers, indie nursery rhymes of a sort that instantly conjure up bright Day-Glo colours in your head, that’s if you hear your music in colour.
Teen Drama by Times New Viking
End of All Things by Times New Viking
Tags: album
