Times New Viking

Lo-Fi on the Totem Pole
Times New Viking Make Noise, Avoid Backlash
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Nashville Scene, January 2010



For indie rock bands of the Internet age, leading a new trend is a bit like whitewater rafting. Sometimes, you can catch a nice current and glide your way to Pitchfork Media's "Best New Music" section. Other times, you slam headfirst into a goddamn rock.

As relatively unwitting members of the distortion-heavy, DIY subgenre known as "lo-fi," the Columbus, Ohio, trio Times New Viking have been forced to navigate through their share of boulders of late, as the nation's fickle hipsters have begun to turn their Pabst-fueled fury on the very bands they were deifying a year ago.

"It's pretty frustrating," says TNV guitarist Jared Phillips. "A few years ago, we were just doing our own thing — we already had two records out — and then everyone was like, 'Hey, there's this awesome thing called lo-fi coming out of L.A.!' And we were just like, 'What the fuck are you talking about?' [Laughs.] Basically, these other random bands started doing something similar. It wasn't really a scene, but it got talked about that way. That's why we always wanted to try and stay a step ahead — talking about going into a studio and things like that. But sure enough, before we knew it, there's this huge backlash. People are saying, 'Lo-fi sucks! This shit needs to be over!' And then they put in parentheses: 'No Age, Vivian Girls, Times New Viking, etc.' Well, sorry. Not to sound pretentious, but we were around three years before a lot of those other bands existed. But, you know, what are you gonna do?"

In fairness, the Los Angeles-based No Age formed in the same year as Times New Viking — 2005 — and the true roots of lo-fi rock actually date back decades earlier, from the hissing tape on early Velvet Underground albums on up through the work of TNV's fellow Ohioans Guided By Voices. Nonetheless, Phillips does have a point. Times New Viking, perhaps more so than any of their contemporaries, never made an effort to align themselves with a "scene," even after achieving national recognition by signing with Matador Records in 2008. This is best evidenced perhaps by the band's decision to stay put in Columbus, foregoing the lo-fi spawning grounds in L.A. and Brooklyn.

"There's definitely a weird mix of pride and shame that comes with living in Ohio," Phillips says. "But it's just much easier here. I pay $500 a month rent, we practice here, and all my friends are here. We never really saw any point in going to New York and paying $10 for a pack of cigarettes when everyone else is doing that. Just seems like, if we did that, we'd get lost in the rubble of like 10 million other shitty bands. I mean, we were never super ambitious, you know? We just wanted to make records and have a jolly good time. Everything that's ever happened for us has just sort of happened the natural way."

Phillips says he and bandmates Beth Murphy (vocals, keyboards) and Adam Elliott (vocals, drums) originally embraced their ultra low-budget recording style (VHS tape in this case) not so much for financial reasons, but for control—or as he puts it, to "prevent other people from fucking it up."

Fortunately, the suits at Matador have made no effort to tamper with Times New Viking's approach, starting with the band's acclaimed self-recorded effort Rip It Off in 2008 and continuing with last fall's slightly moodier Born Again Revisited. (Moodiness is relative when you're talking about 15 two-minute noise-pop jams).

"We like working with those guys," Phillips says of their label, "but we're also the low man on the totem pole with them. So there's not any extra pressure on us so much as just an added opportunity. We're not stupid. We all realize we're in a position where if we make a really accessible album, we could probably do pretty well. The ball's in our court, more or less. I mean, at first, we kind of made a deliberate point not to change anything and just go on as we would have been doing it before. But now it's just like, how many times can you make a lo-fi record of one-and-half minute songs?"

Apparently, Phillips isn't interested in finding out, as he says Times New Viking is primed to head into a proper studio for the first time to start work on their next record. Whether or not they will shake the lo-fi brand and survive on the strength of their undeniable pop instincts remains to be seen, but Phillips certainly isn't losing any sleep over the reactions that await them.

"We always liked that people either instantly hate us or instantly like us, for whatever reasons. We always considered that a good sign. When people really hate your band, you must be doing something right."

Beach House - Teen Dream

Beach House
Teen Dream
Sub Pop

Last summer, I had the chance to speak with Beach House singer/keyboardist Victoria Legrand about her band’s notoriously melancholy reputation. She replied with what was essentially a mission statement for the album that became Teen Dream: “The melancholy thing is okay, but I think many other colors in the emotional rainbow are coming. I hope to start hearing new words other than ‘languid’ and ‘sleepy.’”

In fairness, those words never did Beach House’s first two albums any justice in the first place. The Baltimore-based duo of Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally have routinely had their superb pop sensibilities overshadowed with lazy comparisons to “audio Ambien,” thanks mostly to the admittedly dreamy combo of Scally’s weepy slide guitar and Legrand’s spooky church organ. On closer inspection, songs like “Master of None” from their 2006 self-titled debut and “Heart of Chambers” from 2008’s Devotion were startlingly catchy in their own slow-motion way. Still, there’s no denying that Teen Dream—Beach House’s third album and Sub Pop debut—will open up the adjective box for this band once and for all.

This is easily the best Beach House album to date, as well as the best indie album of the year thus far—a statement that just might hold true come December. Legrand and Scally, as promised, have moved into new territory, from the Cocteau Twins-ish lead single “Norway” to the Arcade Fire-y build-up of the epic “10 Mile Stereo.” Every song stands up alone, too, avoiding the coagulation that occasionally occurred on side two of the band’s earlier efforts. As for old fans who prefer their Beach House albums as the soundtracks to unmade David Lynch films, don’t fear. The chorus from “Silver Soul” (“It’s happening again”) sure seems like a Twin Peaks reference. And if that show could be on network TV, it only makes sense that Teen Dream will find the Billboard charts.

(Andrew Clayman)

Published in The Metro Pulse, January 2010

Eels - End Times

Eels
End Times
V2

After a four-year gap between 2005’s remarkable two-disc Blinking Lights and Other Revelations and last summer’s patchy experiment in duality Hombre Lobo, Mark Oliver Everett is back in a hurry with End Times—the saddest Eels album to date, which says a lot.

Blessed and cursed by Eels’ brief radio success in the mid ’90s (“Novocaine for the Soul,” anyone?), Everett (aka E) has spent 15 years making honest, thoughtful, fun, and heartbreaking records that were too weird for the masses and not trendy enough for the hipsters. Now in his mid-40s, Everett hasn’t shown much interest in expanding his minimalist pop style, nor has he conquered all the demons that have followed him since the deaths of his father, mother, and sister in quick succession. End Times is certainly remindful of the album often recognized as the Eels finest, 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues, but it’s bleaker, in its way. While Electro-Shock dealt with family deaths and grief, End Times is about the end of Everett’s marriage and how loneliness can be a lot harder the older you get. That’s best captured in the soft, simple, but shattering “Little Bird” and “In My Younger Days.” But Everett has always had a knack for having fun in the midst of a personal apocalypse, and the bouncy “Gone Man” and “Paradise Blues” keep End Times from falling into a vat of down-tempo misery.

End Times isn’t on par with the much more pristinely produced Electro-Shock or that record’s highly underrated follow-up, Daisies of the Galaxy. But it’s a brave and almost uncomfortably intimate album that should be greatly appreciated not only by long-time Eels fans, but also by anyone looking for an escape from both radio drivel and the pretense of indie rock.

(Andrew Clayman)

Published in The Metro Pulse, January 2010

Avett Brothers

Road Full of Promise
Avett Brothers Roll Dice and Make Hay on Major Label Debut
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, December 2009

Crossing state lines, a pothole-ridden highway can turn to smooth blacktop in an instant— like a little reward for exploring new territory. In essence, this is what the Avett Brothers discovered when they sat down to record the song “Laundry Room”—arguably the most polarizing track on the band’s highly successful major label debut, I and Love and You.

“I’ve heard complaints through the grapevine about that song being so different on the record from what it had been live,” says Scott Avett (vocals/banjo/piano). “But it’s actually one of the most important songs on the album.

“The first day in the studio for I and Love and You, we started out like we always had in the past. We put up three stations with partitions, set up just like we did on stage, and said, ‘okay, this is our starting point. We’ll play the songs just like we do live.’ But when we worked on (“Laundry Room”) all that day, nothing good happened-- it just sounded abrasive and terrible every time we did it. That had never really happened to us before, where we were just stumped. So we made a call that night to try a different approach, to change the tone. We came in the next morning and sat down with the guitar and piano-- instead of standing up in full charge position-- and we did it one time and all agreed, ‘this is it. This is how it’s going to be done.’ In retrospect, we had to get our sea legs in the studio, and changing up that song kind of provided the sort of confidence and mood that we needed for the rest of the record. It set the tone.”

For some longtime fans of the Avetts’ rough-around-the-edges, North Carolina brand of Americana, the mellow reworking of “Laundry Room” seemed to substantiate their fears of a major label soul squeeze. In reality, though, Scott, his brother Seth (vocals/guitar/piano), and bassist Bob Crawford had been gradually driving toward these smoother roads since 2003’s A Carolina Jubilee. And to their credit, Columbia Records had wisely paired the band with a trustworthy chaperone for the last leg of that journey, with superstar producer Rick Rubin keeping things respectfully reined in on I and Love and You. The album has its slick moments, to be sure, but it never ventures too far from the folk, pop, and country touchstones the Avetts had already established during their decade in the indie world.

“It was very un-intrusive,” Scott Avett says of the partnership with Rubin, whose most noteworthy prior foray into Americana had come with Johnny Cash’s comeback albums in the ‘90s. “Rick was able to lead and produce in a very quiet manner. He didn’t take charge in the conventional ‘take charge’ kind of way. But that made him all the more effective, I think. I learned a lot from that—the capability for making things happen without throwing a fit, so to speak.”

As if jumping to Columbia and working with Rick Rubin wasn’t enough, I and Love and You also debuted with a high profile promotional push at Starbucks, making the Avett Brothers’ arrival in the mainstream all the more tangible and borderline aggressive. Still, by the time the album was released this past September, any concerns of a backlash had long since been dismissed by the band members themselves.

“It was a non-issue,” Avett says without hesitation. “All the worrying we did about signing with a major label had to be done before we agreed to sign a contract. So we allowed that to happen at the table, and from there, it was done with. We kept the decisions that were important to us protected and in our court, but we were also willing to let go of some stuff, because it was time for that—it was time to learn. It’s always time to learn really. But it seemed like, for us, it was time to take notes and let someone else take the lead in certain departments. Whether people loved it or not, we would walk away getting an education in working with a serious producer in a serious studio on a major label. We saw that as the greatest reward of the whole process. And we had a hunch that we’d be able to make a really quality record we could be proud of, too.”

If the reviews and record sales are any indication, the Avett Brothers knew exactly what they were doing. I and Love and You reached a career best of No. 16 on the Billboard 200, and Paste Magazine not only named it their Album of the Year, but also ranked it the ninth best album of the entire decade.

“We’ve been very fortunate to get to the point where we could reach some of these milestones,” Scott Avett says. “But at the same time, you never really feel ‘arrived.’ I don’t feel any different as far as what I need to do—the demands I have of myself as an artist. That hasn’t changed at all. Rather than going back to pat yourself on the back, you have to step away and return to where the music itself is made and the way you feel when you make it. That’s kind of the trick of it for us.”