Corazón, Southwest Roots Music & T-Cubed present the Thirsty Ear Festival Kickoff Party
Times New Viking
Contrary to popular belief, the members of Times New Viking are not art school dropouts, they’re art school graduates; and instead of following the path of stuffy galleries and regular unemployment, they chose to start a band. Times New Viking, consisting of Beth Murphy on keyboards/vocals, Adam Elliott on drums/vocals, and Jared Phillips on guitar, began inconspicuously in 2003, when it was particularly out of vogue to do it yourself. Those initial demos of messy, noise-crusted, indie rock recordings were merely practice tapes of late-night house parties. Those tapes were lovingly lo-fi, tapping into the gnarled aesthetics of Columbus’ old guard and reflecting the influence of legendary Ohio bands like Guided by Voices, the Breeders, and Pere Ubu. Frequently playing out, Times New Viking soon got too big for the living room, and eventually those tapes dropped into the hands of Philadelphia’s Tom Lax. The cacophony Lax found was enough to coax him out of retirement, lifting the mothballs from his dormant Siltbreeze imprint to release the band’s debut album, Dig Yourself, in 2005. By the time Present the Paisley Reich arrived in 2007, it was easy to see that the jitters and foibles of being a rookie band had been shed, and Times New Viking were increasingly confident in their songwriting. Phillips’ guitar-playing became an electrifying spectacle in the live setting; Murphy’s synth bleats and cooing innocence a magnet for collector scum; and Elliott’s lyrics, about love and war and romantic nihilism, stronger in their call to arms for a disaffected youth culture. But no matter how far their star rose—making the jump from Siltbreeze to indie-elite Matador Records in 2007—they still sounded like the best Rough Trade one-off you always wanted to keep to yourself.
http://www.myspace.com/timesnewviking
The Proxemics are a stripped down assembly, sometimes appearing as a garage-based, dirty wall of sound, sometimes as deconstructed balladeers offering you their hearts on their sleeves. Neville unites crunchy, angular alt-rock with a singer-songwriter sensibility while never letting go of his experimental roots. Mimicking the definition of their moniker, The Proxemics are at times both distant and intimate, treating their audience to an emotional tug-of-war. The songs appear effortless on the surface, but upon deeper investigation they become a complex system of asymmetrical forms with sonic threads and noise, weaving songs into a larger, continuous theme.
The shifting members of The Proxemics are all long-time members of the High Mayhem Emerging Arts Collective, also based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, which has helped shape the City Different’s unique underground scene for the last ten years.
