Super Fuzzed Up: Times New Viking.

Last week I saw a wonderful band called Times New Viking. The show was part of the Music and Movies in the Parks series. Usually they bring in local bands to play these gigs but an international band who was scedualed for that night had to cancel the show due to problems with their Visa's. Times New Viking replaced them.
For those of you who don't know Times New Viking is a 3-piece punk/pop band from Ohio. (guitar, drums, keys) anyhow their music is pretty fun especially live. Everything is distorted. On purpose, yes, however weird it may seem to some people everything. One of the first things I noticed when I got to the show (a little late) was that their mics were pre distorted in some way which was pretty cool. The drummer Adam usually sings and Beth the keyboardist does some singing as well. For music and movies there are usually quite a lot of people so I decided to go down next to and sort of in back of the stage to hear and see better. I noticed that Adam was sitting on a old wood folding chair! I thought it strange to have a drummer sit on a folding chair. At one point when i went away and then came back again he was standing up playing drums and the chair was folded up and off to the side. (Maybe it broke.)
I had noticed that there was no merch stand around (and there usually is at these shows) so after their short 45 minute set I waited around a bit and approached Beth asking her if they had any CD's with them for sale. She said they didn't because this was the end of their tour so they had sold out but she said she'd check in the van anyways. So about 5 minutes later she came back with their 2008 album "Rip It Off." (You can imagine that I was pretty happy by now) I paid her the money, thanked her and then ran back to where we had a blanket laid out on the ground. I sat and told my story of how i managed to get this CD to my mom and dad (and aunt and uncle for that matter who were also at the show with us) I soon asked if anyone had a pen and then ran off back to the stage. On the way there I noticed that Jared (the guitarist) was running sort of away from the stage. He stopped to talk to someone and I quickly asked for his autograph before he ran back to the stage to pack up. He signed it and crossed off the 2 peace signs which are on the cover on the album. Adam was a bit closer to the stage so I ran down there and asked him to sign it, he the asked me "Did Jared already sign this?" and I said yeah. He chuckled a bit and signed his name and drew 2 peace signs next to where they had been previously crossed off. I didn't get Beth to sign it but she seemed in a sort of bad mood and I had already asked her for a CD and all so I didn't get it.
The next day I listened to "Rip It Off." It's a pretty cool disc of music. most of the songs are really really short (and sweet of course) but nonetheless great. My favorite is "Drop-Out" also known as "Get Off" and is pretty much 1 minute of "She got off, he got on she got up he got off!" "(my head)" is a 2 minuter about messing with someone's mind/head and is pretty fun as well. The album starts off with "Teen Drama" which is about (you guessed it) Teen Drama. Everything on "Rip It Off" is super distorted and its often hard to follow along the lyrics.
Apperantly the genre of music that TNV fit under is "Shitgaze" which i assume is a take off on the genre "Shoegaze" like Pavement and My Bloody Valentine. Other notable Shitgaze bands include No Age and Wavves (both which I'll blog about later, stay tuned) anyhow, if your into punk music that poppy and is really distorted check out Times New Viking.

http://www.matadorrecords.com/times_new_viking/
www.myspace.com/timesnewviking

-Eliot Larson, August 19th 2009