Times New Viking was headlining the night at the Satellite on Sunday, and although the two other bands had already brought a lot of energy, the trio did not let the excitement level go down, on the contrary!
With Adam Elliott on drums and vocals, Jared Phillips on electric guitar and Beth Murphy on keyboards/guitar and vocals, they played a loud and fast set, filled with songs obsessed by speed and nervous beats. The drum was acting like a jackhammer between Adam Elliott’s arms, and the throbbing keyboard and guitar were constantly re-acting the same riffs, building up a sort of hypnotic ambiance.
Adam Elliott, with his muscular approach of drumming, was directing the show, asking if people had questions between the songs, announcing how many songs were left to play,… was it a race?
For some tunes, it was as if they were trying to beat a speed competition, playing, what it seemed to be rather sweet songs, as distorted and fast as possible, making the vocals indiscernible from the emerging white noise. But, if the wall of fuzzy guitar riffs was almost all you can hear on certain songs, other tunes were more melodious and had plenty of hooks to catch.
The band, which is from Columbus Ohio, and whose moniker is a play on the famous font, has recently signed with Merge for the release of their fifth album ‘Dancer Equired’. This last album has been described as a departure from the fuzzy sound of their previous albums, which could explain why some of their songs sounded differently… but shitgaze? What is that genre they are associated with?
When I actually could hear her, Beth Murphy’s vocals were actually quite similar to Kim Deal’s from The Pixies, with sometimes more dissonance, and their music, which has often been compared to that of their touring band companion, Guided by Voices, was a challenging and exhausting thing to follow, like witnessing some speeding object, you would try to catch in total velocity.
Listening to some of their official videos on line (for example ‘No Room to Lie’) gives a complete false idea of their live sound: there was actually very little of that clean poppy noise on Sunday night, it was rather a fuzzy one, stormy and grungy, and quite hard to get right away.