Album Review: Times New Viking - Dancer Equired

Frantic lo-fi popsters Times New Viking have long had a reputation for using quirky, primitive recording techniques (initially transferring their music straight to cassette, latterly direct to VHS tape), as well as sloganeering lyrics and shambling but succinct tunes. Dancer Equired, the Ohio band's fifth full-length, signals a departure from previous efforts in as much as it has been recorded semi-conventionally – at an actual studio facility, would you believe?!! – but sadly this move appears to have led to a loss of much of the lackadaisical charm that had previously propelled the trio into the hearts of a small but dedicated following.
 
While this latest album is still imbued with a Guided by Voices-style musical simplicity and nursery-rhyme sensibilities, the reality is that these kinds of haphazard songs of romance and riot simply come across a hell of a lot better when they sound like they were recorded in a tin can rather than on Pro Tools. This being said, there are some superb moments of ramshackle melody and equally lovely durations of drone on display here: tracks like ‘Ever Falling In Love' and ‘Don’t Go to Liverpool’, together with super-catchy lead single 'No Room to Live', radiate no little amount of grinning, sunny charm.
 
On the downside, however, a sizeable chunk of Dancer Equired has an unfortunate tendency to drag. Where one might expect, as before, to find Royal Trux-like explosions of racket or pithy ambles into bittersweet acoustic territory, we instead get brief (but still seemingly overlong), lacklustre dirges like ‘Want to Exist’ that are, simply stated, pretty damn boring. Album-closer ‘No Good’ almost manages to rescue things at the death – it's a real 90-second treat that would no doubt be ending compilation tapes across the land this summer if people still did that sort of thing. It’s just a shame that so few of the preceding thirteen tracks come close to matching its scratchy, striking simplicity.