Rip It Off

With 16 tracks in 31 minutes (only one track exceeding the three-minute mark) Columbus, Ohio’s lo-fi trio Times New Viking keep to their short, sweet, hit-n-run approach for their third album, 2008’s Rip It Off. Their deliberately raw sound creates an alluring blur of harsh distorted guitars and crunchy, deafening keyboard riffs with drums so deeply buried they’re more felt than heard. Amongst this avalanche of sound, genuine tunes poke through. No one’s going to confuse “(My Head)” or “The Wait” for Top 40 hit singles, but for a generation brought up on the anarchic chaos of Swell Maps, early Pavement, Guided by Voices, Royal Trux and other champions of unrefined noise and pop, Rip It Off, like its predecessors, 2005’s Dig Yourself and 2007’s Present The Paisley Reich, delivers a satisfying whirlwind. Garage rock roots poke through, but sometimes it’s the malicious pounding of a single note that makes the greatest impact, as “Relevant: Now” (the three and a half-minute epic here) proves with its relentless grind.