Sometimes you just know you’re going to be spending a fair amount of time with an album. One listen and a relationship forms: you, me, the summer and more. Such is the case with Times New Viking’s latest effort, ‘Dancer Equired’.
The band’s fifth studio album is illustrative of a group maturing in terms of sound. The lo-fi edge is still there, but the band seem to have navigated their way past the boxes labelled distortion and made their way out of the garage and into a genuine studio. The hiss and punk clutter exhibited on their excellent earlier releases – most notably 2009’s ‘Born Again Revisited’ and 2008’s ‘Rip it Off’ – has been cleaned up, but not sterilized to the point of losing the band’s rough edges. Time New Viking’s sound is now less chaotic, and as a result it’s ready for a wider audience.
And it’s good: really good. The garage sound is still there (now with added surf rock); the minimalist lyrics the band has become synonymous with are still there; the shouty dual vocals of Beth Murphy and Adam Elliot are still there. But everything’s more focussed. The melodies are sharper, the beats are snappier and the riffs throb through you. The band is now making music which contains two elements many others strive to achieve, but often fail to obtain: accessibility and credibility.
‘Try Harder’ epitomises this. The track deserves air-time and lots of it. It makes you want to sing, dance and riff along with the simple but killer guitar work. But singling out just one track would be an injustice to ‘Dancer Equired’: the album is full of tunes you want to return to again and again. ‘Ways to Go’ – which crashes out of the back of the previous track ‘California Roll’ – has some simple yet sublime keyboard work, while Murphy and Elliot’s vocals twist together like a suntanned Moore and Gordon. ‘More Rumours’ is a mid-paced pounding garage track, with the duo’s saccharine vocals colliding with the distortion and grind. ‘Don’t Go to Liverpool’, is another great shout-a-long, while ‘Fuck her Tears’ is a bouncing garage/surf combo, worthy of a place on many a mixtape.
Five albums down and this could really be the signal of a band reaching the peak of their powers. We could ask where next for Times New Viking? But we won’t. Instead we’ll just enjoy this moment they’ve created. DS
