Forgive me Father, for I have scened

Times New Viking’s third album Rip It Off, their first to be released on Matador Records, became the darling of the so called ‘shitgaze’ scene. Whichever Pitchfork employee exhausted the synonym function on his computer to come up with such labels as witch house, chillwave and nu-gaze certainly surpassed his or herself by dreaming up the genre of shitgaze. It was a short lived explosion of lo-fi guitar wailings trying to overshadow its more sullen older brother, shoegaze. At first it was hard to comprehend such a proposition as anything but a joke that I couldn’t find the punchline for. Yet there have been some promising bands to emerge, namely the gut-wrenching fuzz of A Place To Bury Strangers and the dreamy distortion of Times New Viking. Revisiting the latter’s best release, Rip It Off, and having discovered how impressive it was, I refuse to let it be forgotten in some scene which has lost its hipster appeal.

The best song on the album is ‘My Head’ with its anti-poetic, discordant lyrics nestled in a bed of feedback. The cry of “I need more money ‘cause I need more drugs” is so stripped down that a chill crawled down my spine. Obviously, the lo-fi production value will not appeal to everyone’s tastes but there is a certain urgency and visceral thrill which comes with abandoning any pretence of gloss. In fact, I will go so far as to claim that the world has become so auto-tuned that it is entirely refreshing to find a beautiful bubble-gum chorus beneath layers of heavy distortion as in ‘Teen Drama’. In the garden of modern pop there are so many daisies dressed up as roses that to actually find one fragrant and beautiful flower which manages to grow in a suffocating environment of feedback and screeching guitars is such a wonderful experience.

Other highlights on the album include ‘Mean God’ and ‘Another Day’ which are both listenable to by people who cannot get into lo-fi. For those of you who persist with the whole album, however, one can feel the exuberant buzz which Times New Viking have created. With their DIY aesthetic and barely any songs touching three minutes, the band channel true punk spirit to make something which is up there with No Age’s releases. Many will be put off by the abrasive nature of ‘Rip It Off’ but I would implore you to give this album a try because I have found that it is not just another lo-fi hipster bullshit offering; there is real beauty beneath.