Times New Viking

Times New Viking

Over & Over

Siltbreeze

Eight years after their partnership began with the debut of Dig Yourself, Times New Viking and Siltbreeze join forces again for the band’s latest outing—six tracks, the result of a recent creative (albeit, modest) outpouring of ideas. What’s interesting to note here is how the trio tempers the primal panic-punk of their salad days and fuses it with the sustained, keen pop skill found within their later catalog.  It’s hard to know where Times New Viking goes from here, but for right now, this perfectly distilled elixir of sound shows a band firing on all cylinders. What more can you ask for?

Times New Viking

Dancer Equired

Merge

***Dancer Equired, TIMES NEW VIKING’s first album for Merge, is a return to the hive, even if the record’s creation was out of their usual boundaries. It should be known that for the first time, the trio escaped to a studio, namely Columbus Discount Recording and the famed Musicol, during the summer of violence. With the help of ADAM SMITH and DUSTIN WHITE, Times New Viking recorded and produced an album sounds like a mellow night out. Though it abandons the pissy histrionics of the past, the record retains the loud, brash, mammoth guitars but also magnifies the bright, beautiful traits the band has nurtured since the beginning. Dancer Equired is a new chapter, sure to attract an entirely new audience of intrigued listeners while keeping old Times New Viking fans perfectly satiated by not abandoning those early ideals. Rip it up and start again.

Times New Viking

Paisley Reich

Siltbreeze

What a year 2006 was for Times New Viking. Their hot debut album under their belt, the trio set off on a nationwide U.S. tour (including two scorching performances at SxSW), followed by a springtime East Coast jaunt in support of The Country Teasers, not to mention various scraps in the puniverse of new weird America, and drawing blood from the likes of Magik Markers, Lambsbread and Burning Star Core. All of which is fine and good -- love those chops! -- but fans (and label execs) have been gnashing their teeth in anticipation, wondering "where's the next record?"  The Paisley Reich ably avoids D.S.A. syndrome (an acronym coined by The Shadow Ring meaning "difficult second album").Having developed even more vim and vigor, TNV's blur of high-concept pop, crud, and crunch is staggering. Scribes who languor within the compnoscenti of glossy print continue to peep about parallels to Guided By Voices and Pavement; those of us paying our own way recall the glorious lo-fi shimmer of nascent Flying Nun via The Clean, Great Unwashed, and Max Block. So if you're travelling up and down the SH1 somewhere between Christchurch and Dunedin and hear the luring strains of harmony and distemper, know that it is not The Kilgour Bros., Robert Scott nor the family Crook. It's the malcontented rumble of Times New Viking wistfully channeling spirits from the grime of Washington Beach to the shine of the Otago Peninsula. And in Reich-speak, that may take a thousand years to achieve,...

Times New Viking

Dig Yourself

Siltbreeze

My first encounter with Times New Viking was in the form of a cassingle. I found it lodged in what appeared to be a shrine to them on a street corner during our annual litter crusade. Inside the cassette’s handmade case was scrawled “This am band. Good band!” Next to that was a crude drawing of what appeared to be three people playing instruments. It smelled musty and had a real creepy, cultish vibe to it. I was intrigued. Playing the cassette I was at once taken back at the raw primitivness of the music. The organ wheezed and croaked, the drums snapped with sickness and a guitar hacked through it all like a serrated, gangrenous knife. On top of this was a frantic male/female vocal drama. It sounded like demonic incantaions or really elaborate recipes being delivered in a frantic, almost mantra-like chatter. It was unlike anything I’d heard in a long time. I needed to get to the bottom of the Times New Viking mystery. Long story short, in the following months I saw TNV perform numerous times and got to know them rather well. And yes, I have found many more shrines (and continue to find them to this day).   What you have here is a collection of songs found on the various shrine cassettes. They’ve all been lovingly fucked with my Mr. Mike Rep, (the man behind the lo-fi genius of Guided By Voices’ Propeller and Get Out Of My Stations among other things)...