Some of us out there long for the days of lo-fi, before everything was digital and silky-smooth, when tape hiss roared in the background and the vocals were scratchier than anything a real human voicebox could create, and guitars were crunchy and ugly—you know, the time when the technology of recording music was so unrefined it lent the music a spontaneous kind of character, roughing up the sounds rather than prettying them. For years, those of us who missed the days before Danger Mouse flocked to deliberately lo-fi acts like The Mountain Goats, The Moldy Peaches' Kimya Dawson, and M. Ward, before all of them decided the lure of 21st century recording was too much to ignore. But the good news is, there's a new hero on the lo-fi block: Columbus, Ohio's Times New Viking write catchy rock music that just so happens to be covered in a delightful veil of recording ugliness. They have garnered praise throughout the music community for their tunes, and their loud, unpolished studio work brings to mind DIY punk and the days of audio cassettes melting in the front seat of your car. And you can witness their refusal to go pretty tonight at Emo's....

This Austin band likely chose this moniker because if dinosaurs all of a sudden pulled off the greatest coups ever and rose from ocean depths to take back the planet, this would be the band they listened to as they stomped feeble humans in highly populated areas. It’s sludgy, hearty and crude. The seven-way brutal noise explosion that is this group just released their debut, Not Noiice, with a sound mixing overlapping primal vocals, music scrapes, distorted chords and pure fun that could encourage either artful interpretive dance or a straight-up slam fest....