Times New Viking - Rip It Off

What wonders hath the "blogosphere" wrought? CYHSY, TnT, and now TNV, a band I should technically like because they're loud and shambolic and they get compared to Guided by Voices and Beat Happening and are signed to Matador Records. Somehow, I am finding the process of converting myself into a TNV fan to be painful--to my ears, to my head, and to my heart. To wit:

Ears: In much pain after listening to Rip It Off and its subversive production.
Head: Aching after trying to read along with their lyrics, printed in a size 4 font, squeezed on the inside front cardboard flap of the product.
Heart: Breaking as I prepare to diss my first band and reveal myself to be a jerk. TNV does not deserve to be dissed. Any normal person who heard two seconds of Rip it Off would immediately say, "Turn that racket off!" They are defiantly unlistenable music. No one is going to give them a snowball's chance in Hell unless they've heard a lot of good things about them. Indeed, I wanted to get their last album when it came out in 2007, and I saw a video of them playing a song live and it looked like a really exciting concert experience and I thought they might be the first great "undiscovered"-"discovered" (bands written up in blogs all over the place, but still not in the perceptory field of any of my friends) band to save rock and roll after the White Stripes, YYY, !!!, Liars, Strokes meltdown in 2002. This is what I thought before hearing any of their recorded material. TNV do not deserve to be dissed.

But it is my duty as a "mark" to warn others that Pitchfork's glowing patronization of this lo-fi wonder is potentially linked into some kind of weird partnership with Matador, whereby they review records that aren't going to sell well really well, and review records that they know will sell well poorly, to create a weird kind of supply and demand economics driven system towards the criticism, proliferation and capitalization on indie rock (Krist Novoselic's sarcastic comment, "Indie rock is a viable commodity" from the Nirvana! Live Tonight! Sold Out! video doesn't seem like such a joke when Pitchfork has turned into the behemoth it has, Lollapalooza has re-established itself, Coachella has raised its price from $140 for 2 days to $270 for 3 days, new festivals in exotic locations throughout the globe get added every summer, and Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, and Mission of Burma have quietly managed the respect that comes with being a 2 decades plus strong indie rock careerist while only now beginning to gain the respect of the mainstream) taking place since 2001 and getting stronger and more expensive every day.

TNV are always described as "lo-fi." There is nothing crisp or clean about them. If you were to collect all of the most poorly recorded GBV songs there were, the audio quality would match that of Rip It Off. It is the lowest of the lo-fi. It is worth noting that this band is on Matador. If Pavement is on Matador, they end up working with Nigel Godrich. Maybe TNV doesn't get the same size budget to work with, but they are still on Matador. If they wanted to sound better, they could. Is it time yet to take direct issue with the Pitchfork review of this album, which gives it a robust 8.4? The reviewer goes as far to admit that this band will not sell Volkswagens, but they also refer to the "layer of fuzz" that swathes the album in over-trebled obscurity as a "security blanket." Their security being that they will not win many fans, but those that take time to understand TNV will be richly rewarded, because they are one of the last "exuberant" bands left that don't care about appealing to the masses. This makes very little sense to me.

OK, I will admit I put "Mean God" on my running playlist for today after work, and "Drop-Out" is O.K. and "Off the Wall" sounds like an actual song. But the only well-titled song ("Times New Viking vs. Yo La Tengo") is boring. None of the songs really separate themselves from the bunch. I feel like I could make this album. The singer sounds like a tiny bit like Bob Pollard or really any other regular guy screaming on a lo-fi recording. The other singer sounds like she should be on K records or in a Riot Grrl band. Most of the songs sound the same. They are mostly about a minute or two. They have the same dynamics.

I will say that their lyrics appear interesting. They are extremely direct (I think "Relevant: Now" is about how people are supposed to be taking them seriously now) and the lyrics often work well in the context of their songs and their style. However, they are printed very tiny and it hurts to try to follow along with them as you listen, just one more way that TNV are difficult and don't really care about being nice to their fans.

The only way they are generous with their fans is with how prolific they have been in a relatively short time. One can hope that they will actually put out their own Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain or Do the Collapse in another four or five years. However, if they remain stubborn and anti-pleasure, they will not develop anything more than a small cult following. I would like to see them live once so I could comment on their live sound, their energy, what the show was like, but I cannot recommend this record. To do so would be unfair to anyone reading this review, because later they could confront me and say, "Why would you like that?"

I don't like that. I can barely see why Pitchfork does. Maybe they are a decent band, but the album is crazy and for no one. Maybe they saved a lot of money recording that way. They sure are lucky to be on Matador.

Hunting Accidents: A Brief History of Guided by Voices - James Greer

There are only a few bands to have "made it" that may give non-musical aspiring singers, guitar players, drummers and other instrumentalists hope that their "meaningless noise" may find the audience to appreciate its genius: the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, Beat Happening, Sebadoh, Pavement, and Guided by Voices. The latter three were lumped together into the "lo-fi" nametag, applied to capitalize on the truly innovative ways of that middle band. Sebadoh's earliest recordings date to the mid-80's, Pavement's earliest recordings date to the late 80's, and GBV's earliest recordings date to the early 80's. None of these bands featured the typical accoutrements of standard. debaucherous rock and roll bands. GBV, however, came closest to approximating that cliche.

But this is not a review of that band, this is a review of the book about that band, which came out not long after the biography on Modest Mouse and the proliferation of the 33 1/3 book series, featuring a volume on Bee Thousand. Modest Mouse is not a bad comparison point, as they toiled for years in indie obscurity before the breakthrough of "Float On" (no disrespect to MM, but one of their hokiest songs to date) in 2003. Likewise, GBV toiled in obscurity through the 80's, had little reason to retain confidence, stopped playing live, decided to record one last album to put all their musical ambitions to rest, were "discovered" on the basis of that album (Propeller), gained more confidence, made more albums, and eventually settled on the classic Bee Thousand in 1994 which won them a legion of fans for the rest of eternity, but still didn't make them as a big a name as say, The Strokes, who would champion them in 2001 when it would appear it should have been the reverse. Nevertheless, Alien Lanes, Mag Earwhig!, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, Do the Collapse....through Half Smiles of the Decomposed, their final album, all featured songs generally better than anything else released in those years, but still filtered through the "weird" mentality of their hyper-prolific, borderline-alcoholic frontman (R. Pollard, God to James Greer) so that relatively few people cared enough to notice.

Hunting Accidents begins inauspiciously. There is an "Introduction" which is one of the most fawning, ill-advised screeds ever to open a book of rock journalism (that I've read). Even Steven Soderbergh's reasons why you should like GBV seems a little forced. A book about a band that is not known to everyone but for the few that do know the truth that they really are the greatest band never to be acknowledged (i.e, GBV or the Fall) need not try to convince the reader as to their greatness. The Introduction ends up getting repeated later throughout the book, and the whole thing would be much improved if it were edited out in the final review.

Because after the introduction, this is a pretty good rock history book. Like a good book on Nirvana, or Our Band Could be Your Life, Greer makes it feel as if you actually knew Pollard and his brother and his crazy friends and that you were right there in the garage recording studio they often used with them (and I'm not just saying that as a cliched line of praise--the realism of this book on what it takes to be a band when barely anyone else cares is its most singularly impressive quality). There are plenty of good gossip stories about GBV and Pollard and other bands. The Breeders in particular are given a fair share of the spotlight, as they were the first band to champion Pollard and his gang, probably because they shared his hometown of Dayton, OH. Later on Kim Deal offers to produce a GBV album, and when they actually get down to the recording of it, sad antics ensue, and the story of what could have been a fantastic collaboration but never was comes to light. Deal and Pollard would be an interesting couple of indie rock stars to compare, but this is also not the place for that. There is also a story of how GBV and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists got into a brawl after a show they played together, which truly shocked me as I always felt Ted Leo seemed like the coolest guy on Earth. Now, Robert Pollard may be the coolest guy on Earth too, and it is just too hard for me to pick which band I like better, so I prefer to think this altercation was a result of alcoholic misinterpretation rather than anyone truly being an asshole.

About two-thirds of the way through Hunting Accidents, Dennis Cooper makes a surprising cameo (but not really considering Guide had a chapter titled "Guided by Voices" and quoted a line from "Awful Bliss," and considering the cover of Horror Hospital Unplugged contains the line, "Are you amplified to rock?") to extol the virtues of GBV, not unlike Steven Soderbergh, but with more elaborate praise, even going so far as to call Robert Pollard the greatest songwriter of all time. True, anyone familiar with Pollard will know that he has written and recorded hundreds, maybe thousands of songs, and that each one of them is unique in its own way. Greer is not wrong to have picked GBV as a suitable band to document non-fiction style, but he is wrong when he falls back on other's praise as if to say, "See! Other people like them too! They really are good!"

Regardless of all the superfluous attempts at converting the reader into a GBV psycho, by the time you get to the Electrifying Conclusion Tour and the final show on New Year's Eve 2004 at the Metro in Chicago, you will probably be sad that you were not there (I was because that night I was doing nothing in Lake Forest, IL, and was very sad).

One of the more interesting segments of the book details the recording of Do the Collapse (which incidentally, caused me to buy an 8 dollar used copy of that CD from Amoeba Music) with Ric Ocasek, who seems to champion bands like crazy too (Bad Brains, Weezer). Of course, "Teenage FBI" is a classic GBV song, and the first one I ever heard, and the rest of that album is very excellent, but Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records, who had begun to distribute GBV in the wake of Bee Thousand, gives the most interesting take on it. He also gives the best interviews in the book. First, he mentions how they had to have an intervention with Pollard, which he felt bad about because he admits he had his own problems with substance abuse (the difference between him and Clive Davis) because some of their shows had dissolved into alcohol-induced sloppiness.

Second, he goes into this great diatribe about the song "Hold on Hope" off Do the Collapse. He says he thought Do the Collapse was a really amazing album, except for "Hold on Hope," which he thought was a really embarassing song. Pollard almost admits as much, but also says he just wanted to write something genuine and uplifting. Strangely enough, Cosloy is embarassed because he was afraid "Hold on Hope" would get played on the radio. I think he didn't want people to be introduced to GBV through that uncharacteristic song, or something. But the whole discussion about that one particular song is priceless.

And there are deeper analyses to many other songs, some of which Pollard explicitly reveals the subject matter on, such as "Teenage FBI." This is great for any fan, but probably pointless to any with just a cursory knowledge of them.

And that last sentence probably illustrates the value of this book. But also worth noting (and surprising) is that Pollard was married and had children at an early age, and so has a son who is now 27 or so who contributes 3 vignettes to the book, which are hilarious just thinking about what it would be like to have such a ridiculous father.