We have been going on about Times New Viking since the invention of sliced bread more or less, you know they did it with mangled melodies, burning wire and serrated peaks of distortion, a sonic field of love fever, a mattress in a bedroom crammed with memorabilia and grainy posters from legendary shows only ten kids attended, Pat broke his ankle trying to invent a new dance to this jerky shitgazing craze, a yellow cast covered in old skool graffitti of the fuck this world lets make a new one variety eventually discarded on top of a pile of sneaker detritus, yes, in some basement in Columbus Ohio they sat like mediums saturated on a universe of 90s glory and ectoplasmic garbage, the best of which harkens back to the glory days of psyche garage primitivism, and then they vomited it like cold coffee over black slabs of Siltbreezy vinyl, if you stare hard into these records, not the sides etched with lyrics like cryptic messages in a county jail cell for party hard types, the other side, flip it now, you can glimpse hallucinatory vignettes of doomed love, pristinely sloppy balladry and frantic manoeuvres of epic nihilism, fragmentary visions in the floor of Harmony Korine’s editing room, a total hurricane we can’t wait to see live in their show with No Age and Los Campesinos at Komedia in Brighton this Tuesday, as part of the Shred yr Face tour.

Times New Viking- No Sympathy

This you can get in their Stay Awake EP.

Jesus weeps every time I play Catatonic Youth’s Piss Scene EP in the stereo, the needles cry me a river of blood as a sludgepunk juggernaut spills out of the speakers and lays waste to the room with methodical viciousness, their music is a malevolent force situated somewhere in between Chrome’s machine sex stomp, Suicide’s gnarly ululations, J&MC’s toxic drone and the no future attitude of the true dead icons of the Cleveland punk pantheon, weasel exterminator pop to scare the shit out off your parents, broken bottles, barbed wire around your wrists and lycanthropic transformations in a feral moshpit which some exit minus a few teeth, perchance a limb, every song is a poisonous nugget and a harbinger of doom, viscous drops of black stuff accumulating in a strategic location south west of your ribcage, bad voodoo to be deployed against the concrete walls of reality under a sky the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel.

And this is them being sweet.

Catatonic Youth- Freedom Vanilla

All good psychedelic music converges into a blurry event horizon of truths, myths and preternatural images floating around you like burning ideograms in the interstitial space between heaven, hell and the there and now of some Japanese video game concocted by an illuminated wannabe God designer off his face on some really fucked up acid, hence the normality of my listening to Los Llamarada in their latest 7”, out in Italian label AVANT!, and thinking, sweet baby Jesus everything makes sense, if Can had been a psyche garage outfit with a penchant for recording dissonant stomping epics from the vantage point of a vulture gliding in the incandescent winds of the Mexican desert, good Samaritan anointing the sick and dying of the world with a hungry kiss which is an end and a beginning, then ‘Oh yeah’ would have sounded like this. Fucking uncanny kids, fucking uncanny.

Los Llamarada- Against the Day

WE ARE HAPPENING GLOBALLY

NYC and Brighton: anti-dualistic turbine of fucked up power, and the horrible concretion of an ideology that lives by night. Welfare for the sick, Dario Argento is our prophet.

NYC on Tuesday, Dev from Lightspeed Champion and Telepathe guest DJ

Brighton on Saturday 18th October, the old skool hardcore nerd out where it all began, then off to Angry Dance Party at Micro.

A bard is a versatile class, capable of combat and of magic. Bards use their artistic talents to induce magical effects. The class is loosely based on the special magic that music holds in folk stories like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Times New Viking would be in the bard class no doubt, in their new album ‘Rip it Off’ they open the noise troll’s ribcage with a lo-fidelity saber, crouch over its colossal rocky corpse and extricate from the gory mess a still-beating heart of scintillating melodic beauty which they squeeze inside their small fists showering us with summer love vibrations. We really heart the way they conjugate the sensibility of Young Marble Giants styles via C-86 post-post-punk and the fucked up production of Electric Eels into a epic mess quite unheard of since the good ole days of Royal Trux and Honeymoon Killers, i.e. noise hymns for kids whose religion is life, awesome.

Times New Viking- Faces on Fire

A sorcerer is weak in melee combat, but a master of arcane magic, the most generally powerful form. Sorcerers’ magical ability is innate rather than studied. In the words of the 3.5 Player’s Handbook: “Sorcerers create magic the way a poet creates poems, with inborn talent honed by practice”.

It was only on Saturday that we picked up a beautiful copy of Valerie Project’s double vinyl record, released over here by Andy Votel’s ever excellent Finders Keepers label (Drag City in the States), the idea was to get some of those whiz kids from Philadelphia’s psyche folk scene such as Fursaxa, Espers or Fern Knight to name a few and record music under the shadow of the wonderfully eerie Valerie and Her Week of Wonders czech new wave film Robin told you about here some time ago, this sounds like something we could have dreamed about to then awake thinking, nah, that would be too good to be true.

Well, it is true actually, and it is that fucking good, not that the music sounds any less otherwordly and dream-like just because it, ahem, exists here in the land of the breathing. Arcane magic is more powerful than reality, and some times the right spell can snatch you from this side and take you to its bewitched reverse, if you have any doubts about it you empiricists out there, just listen to any of the songs within and witness your body rise in the air to float with the currents of the night, pending between the full moon and misty fields populated by whispering revenants and gnarly cloaked vampires.

The Valerie Project- Burned at the Stake

The Druid is a versatile class, capable in combat and of casting divine spells. They gain divine magic from being at one with nature, or from one of several patron gods of the wild. Unlike the cleric, druids do not have special powers against undead and cannot use metal armor. Druids have a unique ability that allows them to change into various animal forms, and various other qualities that assist them in natural settings. Druids work very well with animals, and can try to improve a wild creature’s attitude the same way they would improve an NPC with diplomacy. Druids gain a greater control of their body and at higher levels they can change appearance at will, and do not age.

Flexxehawk would then fall inside the druid class, in its older understanding as darken masters of the natural things, this is, before all the New Age bollocks and Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge. One reason for this identification we are making is that we find in them the same stunning feral whirling power that graces the monolithic riff crags of our beloved Comets on Fire or Oneida, arranged in spiral-shaped structures burning with the metronomic fire of Silver Apples, melodies spread their wings like soul harvesting psychedelic Eagles flying over mind expanding vistas which glimmer intense in the best tradition of Kraut rock shamanism.

Flexxehawk- Top Toys