free music friday: times new viking

If you were shrewd enough to catch Times New Viking on last year’s inaugural Shred Yr Face tour with Los Campesinos! and No Age, you’ll know just quite how ferocious this resolutely lo-fi trio can be. ‘No Time No Hope’ is the first taster of their upcoming album Born Again Revisited, a typically hasty follow-up to last year’s acclaimed Rip It Off and sounds almost like good old fashioned power-pop, only the vocals are buried at a crossroads on the outside of Coolsville and the overlaying guitars clang and grind like warring blades of serrated metal. You can barely hear Beth Murphy sing as she competes with drummer Adam Elliott, though her keyboards ring loud and true through the scraping and shouting.

Never ones to intentionally downplay their lo-fi credentials, Times New Viking reportedly delivered the masters for the album to Matador Records on a VHS cassette, which, as daft as it may seem, is entirely appropriate for this band. Influences for the album are said to include Guided By Voices, Pavement, The Beatles and late ’70s British art-school DIY (punk, presumably?), and in true Times New Viking style, only one song (the intriguingly titled ‘2/11 Don’t Forget’) exceeds 3 minutes. Quite what the thematic link with controversial US politico Chuck Colson’s 1976 memoirs Born Again is, we’re not sure, but Matador suggest there is one. Born Again Revisited is released on September 21st.

Born Again Revisited
01 Martin Luther King Day
02 I Smell Bubblegum
03 City On Drugs
04 Born Again Revisited
05 Little World
06 No Time No Hope
07 Half Day In Hell
08 Something Moore
09 2/11 Don’t Forget
10 Those Days
11 (No) Sympathy
12 High Holidays
13 Hustler, Psycho, Son
14 Move To California
15 Take The Piss

FREE MP3: Times New Viking, ‘No Time No Hope’

visit Times New Viking on Myspace

Written by: Alan Pedder

Tags: born again revisited, times new viking

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under All A/V, free music friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.