Apr 23 2008 12:47 pm, JJ Dunning
That’s pretty much it, right there in the title. Times New Viking broke my iPod with their SUPER LOUD BRAIN DESTROYING LO-FI.
You see, their full length debut ‘Rip It Off’ is the finest record I’ve heard this year. But at the same time, that’s the wrong word completely. It is totally unrefined. It sounds like it was recorded by simple, sub-normal folk who couldn’t tell their knobs from their faders from their arseholes. TNV’s A&R gleefully described them as sounding like ‘shitting in a tin can’, which is quite impressive, considering that he’s ON THEIR SIDE.
Next month they’re playing in
www.myspace.com/timesnewviking
Right then, these are the other things what I’ve been listening to recently…
Bon Iver’s ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ and Land of Talk’s as-yet-untitled new album. Bon Iver is just beautiful. There’s a kind of desperateness to the lyrics that makes me think of Neutral Milk Hotel, only it’s not as manic and the words aren’t completely ridiculous. So to summarise, I’m not really sure why it makes me think of Neutral Milk Hotel. In fact, I may have just put that band name in there to sound cool. Fact is, Bon Iver is lush-yet-spartan, but, like their contemporaries Fleet Foxes, they seem to create a gorgeous song from nothing but a handful of dust and a few plucked notes.
Atlas Sound. Now then. This is amazing. It’s all washing machine noise loops and children babbling into microphones, set to waltz-like tempos and eerie, whale-talk vocals. Basically, this couldn’t be more up my street if it was actually parked directly in front of my front door preventing me from leaving the house. Also it has a preposterously long title that I can’t be arsed to type. The sillies.
Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip, ‘Angles’. I could listen to Scroobius Pip talk all day, although as Dep Ed Niall pointed out, he’d be really annoying as a mate. Every time he said anything you’d just be captivated and tell everyone else to shut up, even if he was only asking what the time was or something. Anyway. This album is actually a bit of a disappointment. There are three amazing tracks and the rest of it is a bit trite, particularly the title track. Scroob is definitely at his best when he’s being acerbic and witty, not dishing out morals or trying to smother us with pathos. Like ‘Waiting For The Beat To Kick In’, which is astonishingly brilliant.
I’ve also been listening to the White Denim album, which is brilliant. It must be a complete shambles live though. Everything is just thrown around all over the place, shards of broken Libertines guitar parts and little farts of drum beats that sound like they fell out of Keith Moon as he took his final gulp of oxygen. It’s a bit like bonkers New Yorkers Blood On The Wall, only there’s less dumb-riffery. Genius.
And finally in my 1000 miles an hour roundup of things that have affected this very-nearly-destroyed-by-booze brain… The Whigs and R.E.M.
You see, the new R.E.M. album is their best in YEARS. After being continually let down over the last 10 years since ‘Up’, ‘Accelerate’ is an incredible return to form. Buy it.
And The Whigs are the sort of band that I should just hate to their core, but for some reason I don’t mind that their singer sounds like Danny ‘Embrace’ McNamara. I don’t mind that their guitars are huge-sounding and massively over-produced. They’re enormous and pop, and just about the least scenester thing going. They sound like shouting into a tin can.
Isn’t this the opposite of where we came in? How poetic…
