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."
Wavves Get Higher A San Diego Slacker Rides the Web to Rock Salvation By Andrew Clayman Published in The Knoxville Metro Pulse, March 2009
The internet tends to get a lot of love for helping upstart, unsigned artists find their audience and share music with unprecedented immediacy. What often gets ignored, though, is that this growing online music community is really just as anarchist as it is utopian. Take Nathan Williams, for example. The mastermind of the lo-fi, noise-pop outfit WAVVES has become indie-rock’s new DIY hero virtually overnight, but it’s not because he’s the most gifted, dedicated, or hard working artist tossing his tracks around the blogosphere. In fact, Nathan Williams is just a lazy, skate-punk stoner-kid from San Diego—and he’d be the first to admit it.
“That’s actually one of the only accurate things that people say about me,” Williams says. “I mean, it’s true. I grew up in California and I smoke a lot of weed. And I quit my job and dropped out of school a number of times. I just kind of hang out with my friends, not doing much of anything. So, I’d say that’s a fair description.”
Appropriately and predictably, Williams is stoned as he’s saying this. I’m not even guessing by intonations, either. The dude is literally toking up as we speak.
“The internet is fuckin’ insane,” he says, pausing a good thirty seconds to cough up what sounds like a hell of a chronic-induced hairball. “Of course the internet helped me. That’s what started it all. I put some songs up on the internet and people started to listen to them. I never meant for it to become what it did really.”
What it became was something not that atypical in the modern age of indie music, and even mainstream music for that matter. Before he had ever inked a deal, recorded a proper album, or even played a legitimate show, Nathan Williams was the next big thing. The 22 year-old San Diegan had struck pay dirt with his equally catchy and abrasive tunes about, you know, just hanging out and stuff (song titles include “So Bored” and “No Hope Kids”). The blog gods passed his piping hot mp3s around until, within months, WAVVES had its self-titled debut available for purchase. That was December of last year. Just three months later, Williams and his drummer Ryan Ulsh have already signed to Fat Possum Records, released a second LP (the triply over-spelled WAVVVES), and toured Europe from one end to the other.
“We played 33 nights in a row, every single night,” Williams says of the tour, which also includes the first 33 shows he’s ever played. “It was a whirlwind-- just sleep in the van, drive to the venue, play the show. We didn’t have time to do anything touristy at all. I didn’t even get to see the Eiffel Tower.”
If Williams doesn’t seem to appreciate the enormity of what’s happened to him in the past year, it’s probably just the jetlag and reefer talking. Skate-punk stoner though he may be, he is far from stupid. Williams’ musical touchstones are informed and diverse, from Sonic Youth and the Breeders to less obvious fare like ‘60s girl groups and old school hip-hop. His guitar playing and vocals communicate a visceral purity that was likely key to his viral success in the file-sharing world. Of course, timing was a big factor, too. For whatever reason, distortion is en vogue again at the moment in indie-rock, and WAVVES’ sound followed perfectly in the wake of similarly minded buzz bands like No Age (Sub Pop) and Times New Viking (Matador).
“I just wrote songs that I liked and that I thought were fun,” Williams says, a bit defensively. “Every fuckin’ interview I do, it’s ‘What do you think about lo-fi or this band or that band?’ I don’t know. I like Times New Viking and I like No Age, but I don’t know if I feel a part of anything. I guess I can see what they’re saying. I do feel a little bit of a community with some of the bands I’ve played with—Abe Vigoda and No Age and some others. But yeah, people want to group things. Everybody needs an easy name. I don’t know. I’m Wavves. In the end, it’s not going to help me sell records to be compared to other bands. It’s not going to make people like me.”
Actually, quite the opposite tends to be true. But Williams deserves his props. He is the face of a new age in underground music—a self-made man who reads about himself online and uploads his own videos to Youtube. He’s a kid who absorbed the new online music world and got absorbed by it in return.
“I don’t want to be a rock star at all,” he says. “But I don’t have another job anymore. I make enough money playing music now, and that’s all I wanted in the first place. It’s the only thing I like to do, and without it I’m basically fucked anyways.”
Times New Viking Rip It Off Matador If you’re the type of person who respected the pop sensibilities of Guided By Voices, but just couldn’t get past all the additional feedback and distortion, it’s probably safe to say that Times New Viking is not the band for you.
Like GBV before them, TNV hail from Ohio (Columbus, in this case) and make lo-fi, two-minute, indie-rock songs with a punk edge. To take the comparison even further, Times New Viking’s new album, Rip It Off, is their first for the mighty Matador label—former home to Guided By Voices, as well as some other art school hall-of-famers like Pavement, Belle & Sebastian, and Cat Power.
So does TNV’s music really warrant this sort of hefty company? To answer that question, you need to ask yourself a few more questions first. 1) Do you enjoy the sound of a hissing tape turned up prominently in a mix? 2) Do you like vocals sung through muffled bullhorns? 3) Do you often wish that Daniel Johnston had produced some Ramones records at the bottom of a well?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then Rip It Off could be the sort of throwback garage-punk record you’ve been waiting for. In fact, fine tracks like “The Early ‘80s,” “Faces on Fire,” and “Times New Viking vs Yo La Tengo” (another Matador band) just might fill that difficult 3-4 week gap between new Robert Pollard albums.
