Someone Loves You, Times New Viking, But It’s Not Me

Truthfully, I’ve never loved Times New Viking. Sometimes, I’ll listen to things for the silliest reasons, and the first time I picked up one of their elpees a few years ago, it was for a silly reason. I listened because they were signed to Matador Records and the hype was that they made a really loud, fun minimalist squall. There have been moments in my life when all I wanted to hear was minimalist squall.

Take Half Japanese for example. A very long time ago, I had a gratis subscription to College Music Journal. The first thing I would read in each issue of CMJ back then was the comments of Homestead Records manager Gerard Cosloy. Long before the blog, Cosloy was writing the funniest, most scathing and downright meanest missives on rock music since Richard Meltzer. CMJ should have been sending him checks.

Half Japanese was a band that Cosloy continuously championed, and so I made a contact with their label, 50 Skadillion Watts, and scored some vinyl. Jad Fair, their singer/leader/visionary, had this fantastically grating nasal whine that made him sound like the snottiest of Kim Jong Il’s man-children. Half Japanese’s music was hit and miss, the misses sounding out of tune or listless or just too fucking messy to make any sense of, but when they were on, they were really, really on. My favorite example is the original title track from their Charmed Life elpee, which is loud, fast, and when they hit the bridge with electric guitar, they pin the needles so hard to the right they curl. I played “Charmed Life” for a friend back then, and he just looked at me, smiled, and said “Holy shit.”

What does any of that have to do with Times New Viking? Well, a few of you may know that Cosloy was one of the founders of Matador. When I first read about this “lo-fi” (the descriptor stamped somewhere in every TNV review, cripes) trio from Columbus, Ohio, things kind of connected — not just because of Cosloy’s connection to Matador, but also because that minimalist ethic was prevalent throughout the Homestead roster when he was there. So I listened to TNV’s Dig Yourself, thought it merely ok, moved along and never looked back.

There was something charming about Half Japanese amidst their disjointed noise that I didn’t get from Times New Viking. Where Jad Fair wrote songs with his brother David that were simple and painfully honest, TNV sounded, at least to my ears, painfully self-aware, trying too hard to be cool, wearing indie-kid costumes and playing band. Contrived. That’s the word.

Now TNV is on Merge, and Merge actually cleaned ‘em up sound-wise, scrubbing away thousands of decibels of feedback and muffled distortion. However,  none of that actually works to the band’s benefit, because now you can REALLY hear that there is very little to listen to. Thin melodic structures, caterwauling (no, for real) and cheap, disposable songwriting… it all leads to nowhere. Really, you giddy bastards? You want me to give you my MONEY for this? Are you out of yer fucking minds?

There is one exception, actually. “Fuck Her Tears” is a funny, funny song title, and when they play it, Times New Viking sounds like Sonic Youth when Sonic Youth was, like, a bunch of eleven year olds. I’m pretty sure that a Sonic Youth of eleven year olds could kick the art-school stuffing out of an adult Times New Viking, though. In fact, I’d bet you some Half Japanese vinyl on it.