As the opening drawl of It's A Culture announces
Times New Viking's successful survival of the winter, Dancer Equired seems to suggest that the Ohio trio have emerged unscathed from the torrential blizzards of white noise and general "shitgaze" that blustered about previous LPs. Quite bizarrely, Dancer Equired isn't all that far from a quintessentially estival album. No Room To Live, albeit smothered in shoegaze, is just about as close as the troupe have clung to tangible pop, Adam Elliott and Beth Murphy's nigh on saccharine boy-girl harmonies at their most discernible yet. The 118 second drone of Try Harder opens with what sounds like rusted guitar strings melting atop lurid fibreglass before swiftly evolving into a primordial aural onslaught that's cataclysmic and irrevocably captivating, whilst California Roll sees Murphy emulate Bethany Cosentino loaded up on Prozac. Doused in hall of mirrors reverb, New Vertical Dwellings is high octane rambunction that in turn clocks in at 69 seconds, and is followed by Downtown Eastern Bloc, melancholic ramshackle that breaks the three minutes thirty boundary, veritably marathonal for the lo-fi outfit. Gone are the days of "shitgaze", as Times New Viking prove themselves to be, to all extensive purposes, more or less shit hot, and more perceptibly so than ever before, Fuck Her Tears akin to Eleanor Friedberger pogoing along ballistically to Pavement on x10 fast-forward.
