Times New Viking // Norwich Arts Centre - 27.04.10
What is it that those yelping male/female vocals remind me of? The Pixies, perhaps? Sonic Youth? No, something else. It’s maybe twenty minutes through the set before I can put my finger on it. Christ, it’s Le Tetsuo! With a dash of Violet Violet. And this is the strange thing: Times New Viking – with their roots in Columbus, Ohio – sound for all the world like a Norwich band. How does that even happen? I’ve done some research; Columbus’s music scene is all death metal and blues rock cover bands.
Unfortunately, they’re not doing it quite as well as Norwich bands do. Which is a shame. Times New Viking’s recordings are unique; I'd never heard anything quite like what they did with Present the Paisley Reich and Rip It Off. If I was pushed to compare their studio sound to something, it would have to be Andy Warhol’s production on The Velvet Underground and Nico , or, better, Bowie’s reinvention of The Stooges. It’s all about how the grubby lo-fi production only hints at a wealth of melodic possibilities beneath.
What turns out to be lurking behind all that fuzz, though, should be a good sound, the way the anarchic ultra-distorted guitar crunches over minimalist single key organ tones, the balance between simple catchy pop melodies and angry dissonance. The problem is that they never get it quite right. Everything sounds like a compromise, never quite producing either a singalong indie tune or the abandon of genuine chaos. And since they spend the whole set sitting on that same noise pop fence with barely a single tempo change, all their songs kind of merge into one and make for a disappointingly monotonous performance.
Those sweet whimsical poppy choruses from numbers such as My Head and Call and Respond , that rise out of the murky tape hiss of their recordings, are probably in the set somewhere, but almost impossible to distinguish.
Times New Viking promise something that they can’t quite deliver. Watching them play is like that moment near the end of American Beauty when Kevin Spacey finally seduces Mena Suvari and she nervously admits to being a virgin. They’re just not as dirty as they make out. I kind of wanted to cover up their innocence with my jacket.
Still, there’s so much unrealised potential. The performance is littered with little glimmers of something amazing that the band never quite capitalise on. Come and be a Norwich band. We’ll sort you out.
Dan Bleksley
