Interviews

With new album Skeleton, punk tropicalistas Abe Vigoda place fifth-world fever dreams and Los Angeles DIY on the dissecting table, cataloguing the anatomy of a new hybrid music

Juan Velazquez is the guitarist in Abe Vigoda. His speech is peppered with gently self-deprecating tics; “like” and “I don’t know” and “it’s weird” and “that makes no sense” mark out staccato bursts of static in our communication. In response, and with a temperature of 101°, my thoughts cluster only nebulously around the questions that were intended to marshall them, swerve and disperse and gather, like bees. The transatlantic connection on which we are relying seems equally intent on disruption. Odd chirrups echo through vast spaces; at one point, I imagine birds, blossoms and vines issuing from the speakerphone. Over their cheeps, creaks and rustlings I will later pore for meaning, incongruous possibilities presenting themselves in fever both real and imagined, unavoidable lacunae appearing in my grasp of what happened.
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Intellectualise Ohio’s times New Viking at your peril: you’ll find these dudes getting high on scuzz and powering effervescent melodies through the noxious fog og no-budget analogue recording.

Digital smoke and mirrors: it’s the great hoax of rock music circa now. The felt gloves of a dozen studio hands slam padlocks on the noise gates and over-compress recordings until the dynamic range is flattened and watered down to the level of summer festival beer. The kids can’t tell if they’re hearing a low kb/s rip, or if the moss has grown too far into their ears. It’s gotten so that when faced with the music of Times New Viking – three misfits from Columbus, Ohio who have stolen back the pure essence of garage band din from the two-chord archaeologists of this world, in order to sustain
their endless run of 90-second(1) infections that communicate the inherent absurdities of making
art in 2008 – they’ve forgotten their well-worn copies of Alien Lanes and Half Japanese records over there on the shelf. They’ve lost the joy of not making things out.
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Thousands of punk bands have used personal and political paranoia as a crutch for their songwriting. Others have channelled genuine delusionary states into musical creativity. It’s questionable if anyone has managed to marry these notions in the way Rudimentary Peni have – a ruthless twinning of the surreal and the satirical tempered only by a deft and near-unmatched-in-punk musicality.
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“We are existing in the spaces between, where others are not, where most never look.”

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