In Stores Now: Born Again Revisited by Times New Viking

Detail of cover illustration from Ray Russell's Sardonicus and Other Stories, 1961

Ohio's Times New Viking were bringing lo-fi back before it became the new thing to bring lo-fi back, and they do scuzzy indie rock in a way that is immediately identifiable and listenable in spite of being a mess of musical and non-musical sounds. Last year's Rip It Off was a lot of fun, and it pointed to Times New Viking refining their fuzzy textures with better-thought-out melodies and structures. In a way, I think their new record, Born Again Revisited is a retreat from this trend, abandoning this refinement for a more scatter-shot approach.

Born Again Revisited takes the band's noisy, melodic style of past albums and divides its songs into two camps, separating the noisy ones from the melodic ones. As a result, you end up with some songs that emphasize the noise but offer little else, and the two worst offenders in this category - "I Smell Bubblegum" and "Little World" - are toward the beginning of the record, keeping Born Again Revisited from really taking off in spite of some excellent grimy pop songs like the opener "Martin Luther King Day" and single "No Time, No Hope". The less frenetic melody-focused songs that dominate the latter part of the record also lose a little of their edge from this divide-and-conquer approach, but they fare better overall. Songs like "Half Day in Hell", "2/11 Don't Forget", and "Those Days" are almost pretty (ugly-pretty?) and make good use of Beth Murphy's buzzing keyboards and inflectionless vocals.

After a couple listens, I was convinced that Born Again Revisited was disappointing, but after more listens (that's right - I listen to a record more than twice before writing about it!) I'm liking it a lot better. It has subtler hooks than its predecessors, but they must be there because I've been catching myself singing song-sketches like "High Holidays" to myself at work. There's a lot of bands using these same tricks lately, but Born Again Revisited shows that, while Times New Viking didn't invent lo-fi, they still have a unique knack for making a big poppy racket with some rudimentary recording techniques.

"2/11 Never Forget" by Times New Viking