With short, hook-laden songs like “New Vertical Dwellings”, “Don’t Go to Liverpool”, and “Fuck Her Tears”, it’s clear that the same punk-pop attitude that characterized earlier Times New Viking records still applies on their new album, Dancer Equired. It’s easy to see why “Fuck Her Tears” was one of the first songs, along with “No Room To Live”, to be leaked from the record. It has super catchy pop guitar and keyboard hooks, and what indie kids worth their efforts at irony won’t enjoy singing along (in their heads most of the time) to, “My heart beats yes to your cigarette… Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah fuck her tears”?
Perhaps more apparent here than on some earlier records is a certain sweetness, sometimes in the organ parts and sometimes in Beth Murphy’s vocals. Still, something is always a bit askew – in some songs, like the initially discordant “Try Harder”, much more than in others, like the slightly sad, slightly twee “No Room To Live”. Seemingly off wordings in the album title Dancer Equired and in song titles like “Ever Falling In Love” and “Downtown Easter Bloc” make up a tilted poetry that contributes to the unsettled – and cheeky – feeling.
Songs like “Ever Falling in Love” and “New Vertical Dwellings” use heavily reverbed vocals, and coupled with guitar sounds that sometimes lean toward the retro, tambourine in songs like “California Roll”, and “ooh-ing” and “ahh-ing” choruses, these sometimes add a little of the flavor of girl groups like the Dum Dum Girls (QRO photos) or Velvet Underground-loving acts like Crystal Stilts (QRO live review). In some songs, as in the churning, exotic “Somebody’s Slave”, fuzzed out, winding guitar or keyboard parts create a sort of circus whirl that repeatedly wraps back on itself. Though most songs on Dancer Equired are short and hooky, only “More Rumors” feels a bit insubstantial. The record’s longest track, “Downtown Easter Bloc”, shows that Times New Viking can add layers and complementary sections to more fully develop their ideas. The payoff is worth the (still less than four-minute) time.
Much has been and will be made of the obvious production upgrade on this record. Opening track “It’s a Culture” provides a good first listen to the production values on the record as a whole. There is a distinct prettiness on top of the noise. Here and there it’s almost a tad twee, but at the same time it’s scrappy. They’ve managed to be all of these things at once. The song and the album are produced so that the different melodic lines stand out and play off of each other. There’s a pop sensibility, and lyrics like “patience is boring” are representative of the record’s tone of insolence – and of its shrewdness. This is the same Times New Viking that made Born Again Revisited, but the cleaner production helps distinguish and strengthens each individual element in their sound. The overall effect is still a relatively noisy affair, but the hooks and melodies here are textured, rather than obscured, by a shower of fuzz.
