The Singles Jukebox

I’m certain there’s a decent pun lurking around here somewhere…

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[5.25]

Dave Moore: So I take it these guys are getting critical praise because they sound like a shitty Archers of Loaf demo tape? (Congratulations to the organist for being able to play with his feet.)
[3]

Anthony Miccio: The sound is so grody that I couldn’t tell at first if it was a live bootleg of early Stereolab or The Clean. A pretty enjoyable rarity, but I can understand why neither band would feel pressed to include it on a studio album. What’s one more raucous drone with a keyboard hook?
[7]

Chuck Eddy: I’ve always had hopes for these proudly inaudible and apparently good-natured Ohio tyros — still have a 7-inch they released in 2005 on Columbus Discount Records on my shelf — but after giving Rip It Off a more favorable review in Billboard than it wound up deserving in early 2008, I started having my usual indie-rock doubts;the vocal introversion really did come off as an annoying habit they needed to outgrow, especially over an entire album. But listening to this song as a standalone reminds me why I liked them in the first place — basically, that their undepressed mix of warped melody and recorder grot heckler spray reminded me what I had once liked about Pavement in the first place, in their pre-Matador EP-only days. Here’s hoping they never sell out and let us hear the dumb words, like Stephen Malkmus did in 1992.
[7]

Martin Skidmore: The most lo-fi thing I’ve heard in a while: really crude sounding punk-lite that wouldn’t have been seen as slick enough in 1976. It would also seem too weak, slow and lacking in power, though the keyboards beef it up a bit here and there.
[3]

Martin Kavka: Sometimes art-school dropouts make good music. Other times they are so in love with their own ideology of music-making — by delivering an album’s master tape on VHS, or by recording an “acoustic” version of your single using children’s toys — that they wrongly assume that good songs will automatically result from their ideology. This is one of those other times. I realize that perhaps TNV feel pushed into this position. While listening to this, I kept thinking that ’90s lo-fi now sounds like a planned marketing move to disaffected youth — Guided By Voices’ “Motor Away” is jingle-ready — and so “authenticity” requires the fuzziness to be turned up to 11. But sometimes shit is not a valuable symbol of resistance to mass-produced glitter. It’s just shit.
[2]

Ian Mathers: What people often don’t seem to get (or at least have trouble remembering) is that this whole low fidelity thing is a tool; it’s not intrinsically good or bad, it’s all in how you use it. The overdriven, one-note keyboards here sound filtered through Times New Viking’s usual wall of scuzz, the vocals are muffled in a pleasing way, there’s enough of a melodic throughline that I don’t wonder what the point is. Basically: they make it work.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The Velvets, Guided By Voices, and loads of indie ephemera announce themselves through the aural murk that has been a signifier of authenticity for generations. The key is the braying “Sister Ray” organ over Feelies rhythm strum, and damn it if I’m not reeling all over again.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: As any three year old will tell you, making a gigantic noise is a lot of fun. Times New Viking also has a hint of a tune, which is more than you can say for most toddlers. And yet I can guarantee that more children than trashy noise-punk bands (I refuse to call them “shitgaze“) will be born this year. Sometimes the world makes no sense.
[6]