Times New Viking & Siltbreeze Together Again.

Eight years after their partnership began with the debut of the Dig Yourself album, Times New Viking and the Siltbreeze label have join forces once again for the upcoming release of the Over & Over 12" EP due out on November 13th. 

Track List:

1. Sleep-In
2. Telephone Wires
3. Y2K2
4. Future with Girls
5. Middle Class Drags
6. At the Bars

Audio samples and pre-order options for Over & Over can be found HERE.

Revolver Guide To CMJ 2010

TUESDAY OCTOBER 19TH

TIMES NEW VIKING
New York @ Irving Plaza: CMJ Showcase - Ground Control Booking
   
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 20TH

BATHS
New York @ Cake Shop: CMJ Showcase - Terrorbird


HOLY GHOST!   
New York @ Bowery Ballroom: CMJ Showcase - DFA


LOWER DENS   
Brooklyn @ Don Pedros: CMJ Party - Impose Magazine
New York @ Santos Partyhouse: CMJ Party - Stereogum/Popgun
Brooklyn @ Bruar Falls: CMJ Showcase - Chouette

THURSDAY OCTOBER 21ST
 

GREG ASHLEY  
New York @ Bruar Falls: CMJ Showcase - Blackout Booking

 
BATHS
New York @ Pianos: CMJ Chowcase - I Guess I'm Floating

CIRCLE PIT
Brooklyn @ Shea Stadium: CMJ Party - Hardly Art Party w/ Woven Bones, La Sera, Golden Triangle, Fergus and Geronimo, Xray Eyeballs

HUMAN EYE
New York @ Bruar Falls: CMJ Showcase - Blackout Booking

 LOWER DENS
Brooklyn @ Knitting Factor: CMJ Showcase - Mexican Summer
Brooklyn @ Union Pool: CMJ Showcase - Sinister Foxy


THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART
Brooklyn @ Music Hall of Williamsburg: CMJ Showcase - Brooklyn Vegan

FRIDAY OCTOBER 22ND

BATHS   
Brooklyn @ Knitting Factory: CMJ Showcase
Brooklyn @ Brooklyn Bowl: CMJ Showcase - Pitchfork

MATTHEW DEAR 
New York @ Webster Hall: CMJ Showcase - Windish

LOWER DENS   
Brooklyn @ Public Assembly: CMJ Party - Brooklyn Vegan
New York @ Rockwood Music Hall: CMJ Party - Windish Agency

SATURDAY OCTOBER 23RD

BATHS
Brooklyn @ Glasslands: CMJ Showcase - PopGun


CIRCLE PIT
Brooklyn @ Knitting Factory: CMJ Showcase - Panache w/ AIDS Wolf, Ty Segall, Turbo Fruits, Heavy Cream, Pujol, Tog, Screens

LOWER DENS   
Brooklyn @ Southpaw: CMJ Party - Rooftop Films party
New York @ Arlenes Grocery: CMJ Party - Windish Agency Day Party
New York @ Bowery Ballroom: CMJ Showcase - VFW

TY SEGALL 
New York @ Knitting Factory: CMJ Showcase - Panache, w/ Heavy Cream, Turbo Fruits, Pujol, Prince Rama

Psychedelic Horseshit Dude Shovels Out Some Bold Words.

Wow, this interview is something else. Definitely a keeper. Copied in its entirety from the WashingtonPost.com.

SXSW Leftovers: Talkin' [Expletive] With Psychedelic Horse[expletive]

As I was talking to Psychedelic Horse[expletive] dude Matt Whitehurst on Thursday night outside of Soho before his band's set at Siltbreeze's SXSW showcase, I knew he was going off. But listening back to it as I was transcribing left me slackjawed and somewhat conflicted. His band plays fractured, damaged songs with snotty vocals and barbed hooks that, on record, sound like they were recorded using equipment that no longer exists. Much to his chagrin, that's a pretty popular sound these days. Bands such as Wavves, Vivian Girls, No Age and Times New Viking have become superstars on the indie scene by adhering a similar approach. This doesn't make Whitehurst too happy.

Without any prompting he was immediately hurling every insult in the book at those bands. (Except for Times New Viking, his friends. He tried to explain that one during the interview, judge for yourself whether his reasoning is sound.) Was he just putting on a show? The skeptic in me thought maybe it was all a work and it's all part of a plan to get some attention. Or maybe he truly is this angry at bands that he feels have appropriated something near and dear to him, who have sanitized it, stylized it, cashed in on it, and are now representing him as leaders of a lo-fi movement.

You could say that Whitehurst exists in a small bubble, one that he takes very seriously and is very protective of. He compares message board Terminal Boredom to Rolling Stone, calls Matador a major label and considers a band like Wavves - currently touring couple hundred seat venues - a big star. It's sort of a matter of semantics, but the point is that you start to realize that it really isn't a front, and he's just a guy who feels his scene and sound have been taken over by poseurs and he can't stand it and doesn't care who knows.

Some of the anger may be misplaced, but the you can't deny his passion. Usually if you hate something so much, it means you love something just as much, and there's something to be said about strong feelings either way and avoiding that boring middle. And he doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk. The last time I saw his band play before SXSW was for a dozen people in a musty living room at 12:30 a.m. on a Tuesday night. In the following interview Whitehurst comes off as a bit insecure, a bit shrewd, a bit childish, plenty lewd, a bit inconsistent, very often on-point and always, enormously entertaining and quotable. Good luck figuring out what every [expletive] is. He used some doozies.

Do you like coming down here and playing 13 shows in four days?

Yes. I just like playing with different people. It's always the same crowds when we go on tour and [expletive]. They wanna come out and see Vivian Girls or Wavves or some [expletive]. And we get up there and freak 'em out. So down here it's kind of nice. People don't know what to expect.

Vivian Girls, Wavves - why is everyone in a lo-fi band now?

I have no idea. I don't know. It became in vogue sometime in the last year due to a few figureheads talking a bunch of [expletive] on Terminal Boredom. And now it's exploded into this thing there where Wavves is getting $30,000 to [expletive] crank out this [expletive] generic [expletive].

There's a lot of one-person things now.

Right it's one person with GarageBand and a few chords and like -- Wavves to me sounds like [expletive] TV on the Radio. That band sucks [expletive]. It's one of the worst bands to get popular in a long time. They [expletive] trump No Age because I think it's worse than No Age. No Age is just like, [expletive]. It's really [expletive].

But you're playing at least one show with Wavves down here.

Three of them, yeah.

So how do you reconcile that?

We made "Wavves Suxx" t-shirts with it spelled S-U-X-X. We got tons of people taking pictures with us in those. People are all into it. And actually Wavves came up to our drummer and our drummer had no idea it was Wavves. And Wavves took like six pictures with Rich with the "Wavves Suxx" t-shirt on. So, you know, that little [expletive]'s probably into it or something. And is probably like, Oh, it's like hip-hop, man!

People could know nothing about you but your band name and it would be pretty easy to figure out you're probably not going to be indie rock superstars.

I guess not. We'd love to be but I guess we picked the wrong name for that. We should have named ourselves Wavves. We'd be rich now if we would've. We're better than Wavves, he does the same kind of [expletive].

(Much, much more can't miss stuff after the jump.)

Your band is getting bigger in terms of members but the trend seems to be bands with one or two people.

Bigger and cleaner. Sounding like [expletive] is not ... that's the biggest [expletive] [expletive] crutch I've ever heard. Don't tell me lo-fi, and say, It's a choice and it sounds so much better. Yeah, it sounds cool, but it's only cool when you first start making music and there's the discovery involved in it. And like, distortion is a cool thing. But just because distortion is a cool thing doesn't mean you just record all [expletive] and pawn that off as being good music and you being a valid artist.

[Interruption for when an underage girl comes up to Matt and asks him to buy cigarettes for her.]

What? [She repeats.] Yeah, after this interview. (Ed. Note: Never happened, alas.)

Anyway, so if something sound's real, it sounds real -

Manufactured lo-fi! That's not cool. People can say "Magic Flowers Droned" is manufactured lo-fi if they want but I [expletive] mixed that record as clear as I could [expletive] get it. It was recorded [expletive] really [expletive] and was [expletive] - I was young and we just started the band two years before. I'm not Rick Rubin. But I wanna be. I want it to [expletive] sound like a [expletive] tight-[expletive] hip-hop production. We have enough [expletive] going on to where clean production is just gonna make it sound better, y'know?

If you have to [expletive] keep recording lo-fi then you're a [expletive]. Straight up [expletive] [expletive]. You know? You're hiding. You're hiding behind static. Which is cool, people have [expletive] done it for decades. But it's like a [expletive] easy way out. And you're not gonna [expletive] progress or grow into any kind of good band if you just keep on making lo-fi music.

If you write good songs you don't need lo-fi production, man. Good songs, no matter what kind of production are gonna be [expletive] good. So it's about the songs, not about the production. Production just weeds out the [expletive] idiots. It's like, people that are [expletive] [expletive] and know nothing about music, the first thing they notice is the production values. It's like, Oh, it doesn't [expletive] sound like Rihanna. And it's like, I want to sound like Rihanna because those people will listen to us and take it for what it is. Not like, Oh, this is static-y, it's like the Velvet Underground. And it's like, [Expletive] you. The Velvet Underground, that [expletive] is clean. That is clean as [expletive]! "White Light/White Heat" is a [expletive] album of beautiful, clean static. Clean [expletive] static. That's how it sounded in the room. I don't know, man. I [expletive] hate the new lo-fi [expletive]. Wavves, Nodzzz, Vivian Girls. That [expletive] sucks. It's [expletive] poseur [expletive].

Do you think it'll be fleeting, or will these bands maintain fans?

I don't know. Honestly I hope so because somehow if those [expletive] [expletive]-[expletive] bands, by default, are like the leaders of the lo-fi movement now and we're somehow under that umbrella because we made a lo-fi album. So it's like, if those bands [expletive] don't do good, I'm going to hunt them down and kill them because that's the end of us. They're [expletive] representing a bunch of good bands. Somehow the [expletive] bands get to represent the good bands. But it's like that all through [expletive] history. Psychedelic Horse[expletive] - I think we're better than Wavves, for sure.

I don't know, it pisses me off, kind of. We work hard and I feel like we're pretty sincere about what we do. And to have a bunch of [expletive] no-talent clowns come in and just take the easiest way out and [expletive] rip off - not necessarily even - I don't think that any of those bands are ripping off Psychedelic Horse[expletive]. That's like the furthest thing. I wouldn't pay them a compliment like that. I don't even think Psychedelic Horse[expletive] is that good of a band but it's like [expletive] leagues and years beyond any of Wavves and Vivian Girls and [expletive]. That's elementary [expletive]. Like, [Expletive] my [expletive]. I don't know. Just a bunch of poseur [expletive], honestly.

I don't care if people like Psychedelic Horse[expletive]. It's for me. It's for me to make music that I like. I don't give a [expletive] if anybody likes it. Those bands, they're all about like, Oh, we're girls! Or, Oh, we're skaters! Or, Oh, we're California bros! Yeah, but, can you write a good song? No. You [expletive] put a couple chords together - I don't know. I shouldn't be talking so much [expletive] in an interview about Psychedelic Horse[expletive]. But it's so prevalent now, everybody's getting a [expletive] about all these bands.

Well that's the thing, everyone is getting a [expletive] out of these bands. It seems like now more than ever people load up on a bandwagon.

Well what it is, is the people who have been blogging all this stuff and making this stuff popular. No one has the [expletive] [expletive] to get on Terminal Boredom and be like, No man, that [expletive] sucks. Because no one will [expletive] stand up to those people. People think that all those people who say all that [expletive] and blog on Terminal Boredom, that that's The Word. Like, I love Mike Sniper to death, and he's a friend of mine. But it's like if Mike Sniper says something, that's the [expletive] it. If Mike Sniper says you're good, you're [expletive] the next [expletive] Matador band. And that's [expletive]. Because Mike Sniper, just because Blank Dogs had a prolific career and it was mysterious at first, doesn't mean that he [expletive] should dictate what is good in music nowadays.

And the future of music is [expletive] getting [expletive] by idiots on Terminal Boredom. [Expletive] kids that would be into cool music are listening to Wavves and No Age and thinking that it's really cool. So then there's [expletive] Wavves and No Age copy bands, like third generation, or actually it's like 10th generation [expletive], y'know? Kids are gonna start listening to that [expletive] and be like, Oh, this is cool, it sounds like No Age and Wavves. But it's gonna be even more watered down and we're gonna end up with [expletive] Britney Spears lo-fi.

Is it like the new grunge or something?

I hope it's like grunge or something like that. Because then maybe like someone will give us a couple thousand dollars to make a record and we can actually go into a studio and make an ambitious record. None of these bands getting signed to any of these labels have any ambition at all. It's like, they're comfortable writing two-chord [expletive] fuzzy pop songs. And they all sound the same. (Pauses to check cell phone.)

You gotta take a call? That's cool.

I gotta go smoke this joint with this dude. Can we go over there?

[We go over there.]

It seems like nobody wants to be the bummer on the party and say that something isn't good.
But the only way things get better, though, is if people have honest criticism. That's why music sucks today. All the honest critics that actually wrote good music criticism are [expletive] dead or got [expletive] sold. That's why music sucks. Because no one [expletive] has a [expletive] half a mind about [expletive] telling you when you [expletive] suck. The [expletive] first person that should've been on [expletive] Wavves and Vivian Girls and said they sucked was Rolling Stone. They should've been like, This is [expletive] [expletive]. [Expletive] this [expletive]. Rolling Stone? [Expletive] them! Those are important magazines. They need to [expletive] criticize instead of [expletive] [expletive].

Well Rolling Stone, that's been questionable for a while. You're on the cover then you get five stars the next issue.

Right. It's like being a homeless guy. If you [expletive] [expletive] you'll get money. But if you don't, you're gonna be a [expletive] homeless guy.

Honestly, with the bigger magazines you sort of expect that. But the whole thing was that blogging was supposed be more honest because it could be anyone and it could be anonymous -

Terminal Boredom is the new Rolling Stone. It's just as bad. The bigger heads on Terminal Boredom are ruining music today. Period.

Guy who he had to smoke a joint with: That [expletive] is idiotic. Idiotic!

Matt: That's Rob from Eat Skull. He'll be in the interview, too.

Rob: People who sit around [expletive] typing [expletive] on the Internet all day should be round up and shot.

Matt: I agree.

Dude, that's like, sort of my job.

Rob: Well, you can't fault a man for trying to make a dollar, dude.

Anyway, so you think this will make it harder for the "good" bands to break through?

Well now it's like if we make a record people are gonna be like, Oh, this Psychedelic Horse[expletive] record sounds like Wavves! Because it's lo-fi! No. No, it doesn't sound like Wavves. Wavves sounds like TV on the Radio, which [expletive] sounds like some really bad [expletive].

Yeah, I don't really get that band, they're not the worst.

It's just like Wavves if he had some black dudes and a full band.

I really do just think that people are afraid to be negative, unless it is proven from above that something sucks. Then it's fine.

Truth from above now is [expletive] Mike Sniper on Terminal Boredom. He's God. And I love Mike, Mike's the coolest dude, but it's like, that's why we have a government like we do. It has a balance of powers, there's checks and balances. If everybody is [expletive] [expletive] the figureheads of Terminal Boredom's [expletive] then music's just gonna keep getting [expletive] and it's gonna mask itself as good music and become a disease and kill the youth of America.

Rob: Oh, [expletive]. I didn't realize you were getting interviewed.

Matt: No, it's all cool, stay in.

Rob: Well, I think I gotta play.

Does that make you want to change what you want to do and sound like?

It was like that from the very beginning. I wanna make "OK Computer." You know? I wanna sound like Radiohead. I don't give a [expletive] about lo-fi. [Expletive] that [expletive]. It's stupid. It's a cop out.

So the new record will represent this?

We're trying to make it sound as good as it can. If someone would give us the money we could go into a studio and actually sound like Radiohead instead of trying to do it with lo-fi equipment.

But you have like five new releases coming out over the next few months, right?

Four. Four or five, something like that. Might as well do it, you know, while people will still want to actually put out Psychedelic Horse[expletive] records, which I don't think will be very long. Might as well put out as much [expletive] [expletive] as you can. Things aren't gonna be like they are for this long.

Do you think the inevitable backlash will [expletive] you over without ever having benefitted you?

No, because I don't even feel a part of it. We're just guilty by association. I don't personally feel part of it. We just get lumped in with it. It's inevitable that we're gonna get lumped in with that [expletive]. It's just bad for music.

Rob: You made up that name.

Matt: What? Psychedelic Horse[expletive]?

Rob: No, the name of the genre. (Laughs.)

Matt: Oh, [expletive]gaze. Yeah, yeah. You know what? No one's even made a [expletive]gaze record yet. It hasn't been accomplished. No one's [expletive] taken lo-fi to that next level and made a record as good as "Loveless" and "OK Computer" that is lo-fi and uses the medium in a way that's accessible to millions. I don't know. This took a pretty weird direction I guess. It's just all me going, [Expletive] all this [expletive].

Well, you know, beef is in now, apparently.
It's just I'm annoyed by it. I have to [expletive] see it all the time and I'm [expletive] sick of it. I don't wanna have to [expletive] play with Wavves with his [expletive] gelled hair and his [expletive] skateboard buddies. It's like, [Expletive] off, man.

Well I guess originally lo-fi was about the complete lack of image -
That's all it is now. Lo-fi was kind of cool because the music was different and fresh. But now it's like a thing. It's like clothes. Like, I'm just wearing lo-fi clothes, because that's what's hip right now. This blank [expletive] that has no value in it at all and no passion or spirit. And as long as its stylized, like the logo on the record is something you can put in an American Apparel store, thousands of people are gonna buy it.

OK, so how about Times New Viking. They're your friends, they've done three albums that were all very lo-fi, so -

Yeah, and I've been trying to talk them into going hi-fi. And I think it's like, they're in a position where they could really - they are on Matador Records. They could be making some crazy [expletive] [expletive] with the money that they get and make an ambitious record. But they wanna keep doing the lo-fi thing. And that's kind of even more bad ass because you're on a major label and they want to keep making lo-fi records because it's like, [Expletive] you. We could be going hi-fi, but we don't want to. We're on a big label and that's what everybody does once they're on a big label. So like, [expletive] that [expletive]. Everybody starts sucking once they get on a label. We're gonna stay lo-fi and stick to what we know and keep making good music.

And they might not become the biggest band in the world but in [expletive] 20 years every Times New Viking record that you listen to is gonna sound [expletive] sweet as [expletive] and people are never gonna be like, Times New Viking started to suck. Every one of their records is gonna be like, that [expletive] record was tight. And you know what? It [expletive] came out on a major label. And that's even tighter.

You're doing the Siltbreeze showcase tonight, and it seems like there's a bit of a comeback for labels, where you can trust something will be good if it's on a certain label. But then there's the other aspect which you were talking about before.

There's so much music being made now. It's so easy, it's so [expletive] easy to find good music. It's everywhere. There's a million [expletive] good bands and half of that million no one has ever heard because they don't play out of their bedrooms, or [expletive]. Or they don't make tapes or anything. The best [expletive] is something that people have never heard. It's unfortunate the way things are.

Music has turned into a commodity. It's something that's part of like - I'm sounding like a total hippie right now - but it's like this spirit and it's part of everyone. It's something that connects with everybody on a very basic level and it's something everyone can relate to. And it just sucks that it gets boxed up. And the fact that it got boxed up in the first place, people started making boxes instead of expressing their spirit. It's just a bummer.

But it's fun, though. Everyone should [expletive] make music. Do crazy [expletive]. Just make music and hand it out to everybody. Do [expletive] crazy things. No one's [expletive] wild anymore. Nothing crazy happens. No one tells the truth because everyone's so afraid of what everyone else is gonna think, and their image. Everyone's afraid of being pretentious. And it's like - pretension is necessary to advance art. And honest criticism is necessary to advance art. Failure is necessary to advance art. And everyone's so afraid of all of those.

Mike McGonigal's Rave Review of Eat Skull On Pitchfork.

Eat Skull:
Sick to Death
[Siltbreeze; 2008]
Rating: 8.3
Original review

On their first album Sick to Death, the Portland, Ore., band Eat Skull mashes together almost everything that's great about trashy art-punk, weirdo fuzz-garage, skuzzy punk-pop, Kiwi garage-rock and off-kilter bedroom-strum. If you adore the weird songs on the Not So Quiet on the Western Front album as well as the Urinals, Raincoats, Gordons, Swell Maps, Homosexuals, Tronics, Desperate Bicycles, Television Personalities, Axemen, Guided by Voices, Chain Gang, those Messthetics comps, and very early Pavement, then meet your new favorite band. You should know, though, that this record sounds like it was mastered by a deaf person. It's all super-distorted and in the red; even the "folksy" numbers are louder than fuck. But once your ears adjust, you realize that it's all killer, no filler.

Lots of acts are mining similar territory these days. To name the most obvious adherents, Sic Alps, Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit, No Age, and Tyvek have each hit upon their own twisted formula for reinventing noisy art-pop. For some reason, all these groups have decided that the best way to record is if all your songs sound like they were taped on a thrift-store answering machine using its built-in condenser mic, in a tiled bathroom, when you're really high. Was there some sort of convention held where it was decided this is how records are supposed to sound now? Does Tom Lax of Siltbreeze have nude photos he'll release of all these band people if they ever set foot inside a proper studio? And who came up with the "shitcore"/ "shitgaze" term for this stuff? That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. I personally wouldn't mind being able to hear more of what's going on in some of these songs-- ironically, you can catch the distinct parts of the music way better when you go see these bands live.

Arguing against this approach is useless, and if I do it any more I'll turn into Andy Rooney. You might as well walk up to your favorite Scandinavian death metal act and asking them to please write paeans to puppy dogs. Some things are just genre conventions, and you deal: in this corner you get songs about burning churches, and in the other you have more distortion and hiss than Slay Tracks. You'll notice I have not yet used the phrase "lo-fi" in this review. That's because I greatly dislike that term. In its 1980s/90s heyday, "lo-fi" referred to such a wide variety of acts-- Daniel Johnston, Dead C, Sebadoh, Supreme Dicks, Grifters-- that it was functionally useless right from the start. At most, "lo-fi" defines an alleged method of capturing sound, similar to the way that "indie rock" refers to a supposed distribution method and nothing else (aside from "rock"). I am reminded of Jean Dubuffet's quote, that "there is no art of the insane any more than there is an art of dyspeptics, or an art of people with knee complaints." Um, but I digress.

Unlike the current army of Anglophiles rocking the basements across the land, this quartet is as in love with American punk as they are the Commonwealth stuff. They shamble into a muffled memory of U.S. hardcore on songs like the Nervous Gender-ific "Beach Brains" or the wonderfully incomprehensible "Stress Crazy". But there's a surprising amount of variation between sounds and songs on Sick to Death; at times it seems like a various artists comp rather than one band. Here they are channeling GBV and the TVPs on the acoustic lament "New Confinement", while "Puker Corpse" is what the Gun Club would have sounded like if they only made soundtracks to haunted houses. The organ-driven shoutalong "Punk Trips" is a glorious pop song that pits multiple melodic hooks against one another, each of them competing for your heart. I dare you to not get it stuck in your head for days.

- Mike McGonigal, July 14, 2008

Upcoming Eat Skull live dates:
07/15 Davis, CA @ Delta of Venus
07/18 Portland, OR @ Slabtwon
07/27 Portland, OR @ Rottue (PDX Pop Now Festival)

Naked On The Vague 7.3 Pitchfork Review.

Naked on the Vague
The Blood Pressure Sessions
[Siltbreeze; 2008]
Rating: 7.3

You could argue that Sydney, Australia's Naked on the Vague are a bit of a 1980s-retro band, but only if you're thinking about the dark side of the decade-- no wave instead of new wave. Their first full length, The Blood Pressure Sessions, is mired in Reagan-era dread. Released last year on the Australian label Dual Plover and now given a U.S. vinyl treatment by Siltbreeze, the record drips with hollow contempt and dull scorn. It's the Southern Hemisphere's dark photo-negative answer to Times New Viking's Paisley Reich.

Comprised of keyboardist Lucy Cliché, bassist Matthew P. Hopkins, and a drum machine, Naked on the Vague churn out stripped-down and monotonous post-punk. The rhythms are primitive; the most animated songs rely on little more than the incessant thud of a bass drum. Likewise, any pretense of harmony is chucked out the window. As a result, it's easy draw a straight line from a Naked on the Vague song like "All Aboard"-- with it's slanted riff and stone-age drum loop-- to the esoteric scuzz of the past. But although Naked on the Vague wear some influences on their sleeves-- whether that's downtown noise, Flying Nun Records, or Huggy Bear LPs-- The Blood Pressure Sessions is more than just skilled homage. The band's take on post-punk is familiar but also tight and contemporary.

Naked on the Vague aren't abrasive in the Dead C sense, out to fully lobotomize their audience with skree and treble. In fact, when compared to the production value of other records released on Siltbreeze-- a label whose reputation was built on shrill hiss and white noise-- The Blood Pressure Sessions is startlingly clear and intensely silent. "All Aboard" is sheared down to the most meager of ingredients-- one circular drumbeat, a bass riff, and a and a malnourished keyboard melody. There's nothing else, not even amp hiss. But all of the negative space enhances the pervading sense of desolation. None of the instruments resonate and each lyric hangs in the air for only a moment before vanishing back into the void, as if the band are performing in a vacuum chamber.

Naked on the Vague also have a penchant for dubby textures that have more in common with the current Fuck It Tapes school of psychedelic music than to no wave. "Brown Sun/Sydney Lane Road" is six-minutes of clanking abstract percussion and flat vocal drones. There are accordion trills and lonesome trumpet farts thrown into the mix, but the sounds are hardly lush. Rather, they're restrained, like something from a claustrophobic horror-movie soundtrack. These moments alone don't divide them from the weirdos of yesteryear. Where no wave had a marked self-important streak, Naked on the Vague are self-aware. Although dark, their lyrics seem to drift around at the edge of black comedy. "Horse, he's sick/ Horse so sick," sings Lucy Cliché during the appropriately titled "The Horse, He's Sick". We're talking some distance from Michael Gira yelling, "All I can do is kill" in straight-faced earnest.

It's stupid to dismiss or embrace Naked on the Vague as merely the product of their influences. The Blood Pressure Sessions is an enhancement of an idea started a long time ago. During the 80s, bands responded to poverty, vacuous culture, and bad government with music that was appropriately nihilistic. It's not surprising that Naked on the Vague have been able to tap into that mindset 20 years later; the more things change, the more they stay the same.

-Aaron Leitko, April 17, 2008

TNV In Time Out New York

Times New Viking relieves Mike Wolf from his incessant boredom in recent Time Out story.

Font of youth
Times New Viking rescues indie rock from a boring death.
By Mike Wolf

At the end of “Little Amps,” the uncannily catchy third cut on Times New Viking’s Present the Paisley Reich, drummer Adam Elliott exclaims, “Pop song-uh!” in celebration. He also seems to want to assure us it is a pop song, because the minute-and-a-half track sounds like a garage-full of saw blades in joyous attack mode. Everything in “Little Amps”—and the whole album, actually—is distorted to the point where it’s hard to tell if Elliott is harmonizing with keyboardist Beth Murphy, or where Murphy’s instrument ends and Jared Phillips’s guitar begins, or that there’s no bass. (With all the dirt and fuzz flying around, who needs bass?)

Elsewhere on the new record, the band’s second, the fidelity jumps from severely shitty to medium in midsong (“Ladders”) and one channel of the music cuts out for a few seconds (“Common Cold”); the killer melodies at the heart of provocatively named tracks like “Imagine Dead John Lennon” and “Allegory Gets Me Hot” are in constant peril of being overthrown by noise. “Most of those things are happy accidents,” says Phillips, 25 (as are both of his bandmates), over the phone from Columbus, Ohio. “I think they happened while the record was being mixed, ’cause a lot of our music we mix down from a reel-to-reel onto a cassette—”

Elliott interjects: “That already has stuff on it.”

“—that already has stuff on it,” Phillips confirms.

This might seem like a surprising M.O. for any band in 2007, when pristine digital sound is accessible to anyone with a computer, and so-called mistakes on a recording don’t need to be there. Times New Viking has more elemental concerns. “I’m always after the intimacy of someone recording in their bedroom or practice space,” Elliott says. “Music is about getting together with people and enjoying it. If we do it at our house, we can get together on a Saturday night and record a song.” Talking like a short-order cook throwing together a meal, Phillips adds, “You just put some mikes up, make up a melody on the spot and go, ‘That sounds good.’ Then you make up some vocals, and you have another minute-long song that’s good.”

“No reason to think about it too much more than that,” quips Elliott.

That spontaneity helps make Times New Viking one of the most exciting indie-rock bands in years; the group’s live sets are so electrifying that, while in the moment, you feel like there’s no better band on the planet. The trio’s December show at Cake Shop undid weeks of seasonal blues, turning a crowd of roughly 75 people into a gleefully clumsy, beer-spilling mosh pit.

The three, who met at Columbus College of Art & Design, are also reinvigorating a vital, decades-old DIY lo-fi tradition that has always found special acceptance in Ohio. Columbus, in particular, had a superb lo-fi rock scene throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but after the shocking deaths of two of the city’s most talented rock songwriters—Jim Shepard (by suicide in 1999) and Jerry Wick (of the band Gaunt, in a 2001 bike accident)—things in Ohio’s capital went quiet.

Times New Viking’s first show, in early 2004, helped shake a trio of key figures out of semiretirement. Ron House and Mike “Rep” Hummel had for years played in and acted as godfathers of the Columbus scene; one or the other was involved in almost every good record to come out of the city. “Ron’s ego is like, once he found out there were kids who liked him, he had to start playing again,” Phillips says, jokingly, “to make sure he was in competition with them!”

House and Hummel soon passed recordings of the band to Tom Lax, whose then-dormant Philadelphia label, Siltbreeze, was responsible for some of the best underground sounds of the ’90s. Dig Yourself, Times New Viking’s debut, came out on Siltbreeze in 2005, and things have been rolling for the band ever since—the trio signed to Matador before Siltbreeze even released Paisley Reich. The bigger label’s interest in a band that might turn in its masters on a used cassette makes sense to Elliott. “It’s fitting because Matador put out the music we were influenced by in the ’90s,” he says. “Guided by Voices was like our Beatles, and Pavement was like our Kinks. I’d always imagined that the band I wanted to be in would be like if those bands had a baby.”

Present the Paisley Reich is out now on Siltbreeze.

Some sun bleached live footage of "Let Your Hair Grow Long" from this year's SXSW festival.

Times New Viking 8.2 Review On Pitchfork

The Siltbreeze label and TNV recieved some well earned flattery from Pitchfork.com today.

Times New Viking
Present the Paisley Reich
[Siltbreeze; 2007]
Rating: 8.2

Apparently Tom Lax of the venerably awesome Siltbreeze label was minorly miffed that Pitchfork somehow missed Times New Viking's first album, 2005's Dig Yourself. So call this oversight correction, because I fucking love TNV. Dig Yourself was, famously, the first new release on Siltbreeze in a bazillion years, after Lax had mothballed the label that hhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifad brought us such head-rearranging 90s noise-rock totems as the Dead C's Harsh 70s Reality, Harry Pussy's Ride a Dove, and dozens more. Times New Viking, three pain teens from Ohio punning on fonts, are another remaindered irregular tweed suit off the label's rack.

If the group's thrashing pop flair and shouty boy-girl vocal tradeoffs initially feel a little, well, hooky to stand alongside such cap-peeling titans as Mssrs. Russell, Morley, and Yeats, do not forget that Siltbreeze also released singles by the likes of Guided By Voices and was deeply steeped in the scratchy kiwi pop aesthetic. And the opening drums on "Imagine Dead John Lennon" (now that's a song title)-- the lead track from Present the Paisley Reich, TNV's second album-- sound like hammered aluminum, and the rest of the song, all 1:36 of it, seems as if it was recorded with one tin can in Ohio, the other tin can in Dunedin, and the twine dredged across the silty bottom of the Pacific. I wouldn't blink if you told me that the pressing plant actually used dryer lint or dead leaves to conserve petroleum; the album's sparkling multi-hued murk and wet paper flatness will have you cranking the volume in iTunes.

Paisley Reich recalls everything from the Swell Maps' bedroom odes to Gerry Anderson to Huggy Bear's claustrophobically recorded teenpocalypse rave-ups, and from the snotrocket twee of the Vaselines to the musky, druid's glen fog that hung over the production of the Fall's Slates. And the songs are pop-punk gnashing and snarling and droning with all the sexual frustration-- "Teenagelust!" goes one title, and note the exclamation point-- and delicious ennui that's been surgically removed from the radio version. Times New Viking write the kind of terse, bitingly smart lyrics too smart to be buried in 10 million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey, but hopefully you'll just listen harder.

So they caterwaul, "I don't want to die in the city alone" and reject a lonely death with frantic cymbals and keyboards like needles in a camel's eye. 30 seconds before the end of "Ladders" the whole song shifts, jump-cuts, or changes channels, from distant noise to, like, louder noise. They bring out a Nuggets/"96 Tears" organ that they play like a cloddish Terry Riley on "Hiding in Machines". And forget this era of emo concept double albums and epic Neon Bible-style chest-beating; Paisley Reich is finished and done in 28 minutes. If you think that indie rock preens too much these days, Times New Viking probably sport bruises and scraped knees, and if you think it was all over for Pavement after "Forklift", TNV's lo-fi skree and bounce will certainly shake your love shack.

-Jess Harvell, March 23, 2007