Rip It Off

Reminds me of a garage rock era that has long since passed, and evoked some Thermals, early OCs, and plenty of other pioneers in the lo-fi rock space. While lacking in cohesion, this LP makes up for its disparate tracks with an overwhelming sense of momentum and a slacker kind of urgency, fulfilling some sort of unspoken need to get the ideas onto tape before they whither into thin air. It's messy, raw, and plenty of users here are going to hate it, but I love this kind of guerilla musicianship and felt so reinvigorated listening to this album – much better than some of the compressed, carefully packaged, and insipid efforts that have been added to the list!

Nice Lo-Fi album with an extreme amount of distortion. Something for people that like Guided by Voices. Songs vary between a good and ok quality (3-3.5 stars).

Bloody hell, can you get any more lo-fi? It was like being on hold to a punk dentist office. But I did like it, cool stuff.

I didn't dislike this, it had a lot of energy and charm. That much fuzz and distortion covers a multitude of sins though, and filters out a lot of nuance. In particular I didn't get much out of it lyrically, whatever might have been there. A bunch of noisy indie lofi pop influences came to mind, from Hüsker Dü to Pavement to Sebadoh to Guided By Voices.. not bad company in my book but also already a whole lot to choose from in that bag. I wouldn't object to hearing more of this, not sure I'd make the effort though.

Pre-listen thoughts: - times new viking isn't a particularly clever name - this has really low plays on Spotify so it's probably the submitting user's band - looks like something something hipsters. Ok we've got some big fuzz garage rock type thing. A few songs in and so far we've had noise, some dissonance, gang vocals that for some reason get buried in the mix. Actually, to be fair, EVERYTHING is buried in the mix here. They must have recorded the album and run the entire thing through a fuzz pedal. Why? Dunno. Guess they thought it was art. Eh this stuff is really only borderline music, and I'm gonna treat it as such. 1/5.

It takes a while for your ears to get used to the noise and get properly sucked into it, but it's worth it. So strangely beautiful underneath. Genuinely made me a bit emotional towards the end. One of my favorite user album discoveries so far, amazing pick. Strong 4/5.

My kind of indie 🎸

In the best way possible, this sounds like it's being blasted out of someone's transistor radio that they dropped out of a building onto uneven concrete.

Shitgaze more like yeahprettygoodactuallygaze am I right fellas?

Mad in a great way

This doesn't particularly cover any new musical ground, but it's ragged and noisy in all the right ways. I enjoyed it. Fave Songs: (My Head), Teen Drama, Relevant: Now, Another Day, Come Together

I don’t mind noise. I’m not an audio snob. But a bad recording is a bad recording.

Proof that there can be too much of a good thing. Distortion should be used sparingly, not as a panacea.

Pitchfork: Could you explain your album, young man? TNV -Well, basically I just copied noise pop of the 90's. Then I added more noise, to lower the life expectancy of the listener. And these rainbows and peace signs I feel are pretty sharp. Pitchfork- Agreed. Best New Music!

Indie rock, lo-fi, noise pop. Pues muy guay.

I have a soft spot for these types of albums because they feel so earnest and scrappy. For 30 minutes I’m just imagining 3-5 friends in a garage covered with blankets and each of them has enough talent and skill to make something good despite it sounding like it was recorded on a Nintendo ds. Very dinner in America vibes (great movie btw)

Behold: shitgaze. Following the lo-fi recording production of slacker rock in tandem with the laissez faire approach to performing their songs, shitgaze took these ideas to their logical conclusion. Lo-fi to the point of noise, slacker to the point of incomprehensibility, and a whole barrel of fun. Sometimes its barely comprehendible but in a good way. Sometimes it isn't comprehendible at all but still finds a way to be good. Noise being wielded to such an extreme degree while still being purposefully poppy is such a fascinating thing that I can't help but enjoy it. After a while it all starts to blur together but I think that's part of the appeal. Hulking mass of music that isn't trying to be inaccessible or fucked up. It's just a few musicians having a good time and blasting the volume on everything. CONTENDER FOR THE LIST: Nooo too niche I'm afraid.

This was kind of strange and unexpected and elements reminded me of MBV. Which I liked! I wasn't totally in love with it but definitely appreciated a lot about it

Real fuzzy amateur garage indie rock vibes. Not bad and I could see it really hitting if you were in the mood!

It's gloriously lofi and it has some perfectly good songs. Not blown away by it, but I'd not skip if I heard them again.

Yikes. There are tracks on this album so lo-fi, even Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices might raise an eyebrow—and that man practically lives in a cassette deck. We're not talking lo-fi anymore. We're talking lower-fi. Lowest-fi. Is that a thing? It is now, thanks to this sonic spelunking expedition. That said, as a devoted Pollard/GBV fan, I’ve trained my ears to sift through the fuzz, the hiss, and the glorious chaos. And yes—if you listen closely, like really closely—there are melodies here. Good ones, even. But they’re buried so deep, you’d need a determined archaeologist or at least a mildly motivated dog to dig them up. Ideally they would have been buried by my lazy dog who buries bones just below the surface. That’s the sweet spot this album misses by a few inches.

Liked this. I'm a bit of a sucker for the lo-fi thing. Could easily be a 4 but I'll go with 3 to start.

Enjoyable Lo-fi.

'Lo-fi' is among the pivotal music styles that changed my life forever as a young adult listener during the nineties, so, on paper at least, I have no issue with the *absolute* lack of production values in this record, ha ha. The question that automatically comes after that is this, however: are the songs in *Rip It Off* worth your time, and also worth risking a severe tinnitus bout? Or are they only style over substance (which in that case, wouldn't necessarily make them better than the most processed and "manufactured" pop out there)? Answer: it's rather the second option, unfortunately. There's a bunch of nice moments, especially in the second side, but it's not enough to make the album offer something that feels definitive or somewhat cohesive within the topsy-turvy requirements of lo fi aesthetics. Think *Slanted And Enchanted* or your favorite Guided By Voices album in the pack of important records from their discography. Also, a lot of the songs actually go nowhere in a compositional level. This is where GBV's equally fragmentary artistry yields to far more impressive results -- many, many songs by Robert Pollard can be as short as 1'30" and yet you never feel their potential has been squandered by the end of them. This is not merely to adopt a reactionary stance that would automatically state that things we "better before", by the way. Some bands who used similar lol fi sound aesthetics, and yet broke out later, are at least as good as Times New Viking (Surf Curse, to take one example). And this actually works within the confines of TNV's discography. Subsequent LPs *Born Again Revisited* and *Dancer Equired* are far, FAR better albums. The songs are more memorable, the tracklist is more dynamic, and so is the sound in those two other albums -- which sees the American band have their feet still firmly planted in the lo fi world, and yet also offer a recording that gives a minimum of clarity to serve the songs right. So why was *Rip It Off* originally singled out then, to the point where it became "best new music" on Pitchfork? Well, simply because it was their first release on Matador records, and their profile suddenly became hotter within certain circles. Sometimes the independent label world works exactly like the one of majors -- with far less promotional means, admittedly. And when you look back on music history, you also have to decode those contextual matters to help you sort out the wheat from the chaff. If you read between the lines of that Pitchfork review, you can actually realize TNV was actually being overrated one word after another: "TNV continue to straddle a sort of middle ground that might be too melodic and structured for real noise fans and too sludgy for indie-pop shut-ins, but by honing the hooks a little more, *Rip It Off* leans ever so slightly towards the latter. It doesn't rock as hard as the band's debut, nor does it have anything quite as instantly memorable as "Teenage Lust!", but it's their most satisfying front-to-back listen." Well it certainly isn't now. And, in fact, it wasn't really the case either back then. In essence, there's nothing in *Rip It Off* that you can't find in their previous LPs released by the far smaller Siltbreeze label. The thing is, being so praiseworthy to the band while they were still transitioning to greater things was not a favor for them in the long run. It might have made skeptics raise their eyebrows later, which is a shame since I feel the end of the band's career had better songs to offer -- listening to songs from that time period right now, and it's a blast, honestly! There are more chord changes, nicer vocal lines, more variety, lots of endearing details... Too bad they had to split after all that. Can't even give you a list of great songs, there's a whole bunch of them, and I gotta do other things now. So many, many thanks to that anonymous user for making me dig further the Times New Viking question. The thing is, *Rip It Off* is certainly not the album I want to remember from them, *Born Again Revisited* and *Dancer Equired* are. No offense, I hope. 2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3. 7.5/10 for more general purposes: 5 + 2.5 ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ----- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 49 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 62 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 116 (including this one) --- Hey, Émile. J'ai enfin trouvé le temps de répondre ! Regarde sous la review de *Young, Loud And Snotty* des Dead Boys !

Hard to listen to.

This one just didn’t click with me.

Didn't do anything new or exceptional

Rating: 5/10

holy toledo. this is like a horrible quality cassette tape. and given the more recent recording date, this was clearly all intentional. there's no depth to the bass and percussion, the voice is lost... ultimately it seems there's no chance for the music to make any impact with how they've chosen to record this.

At the first song, I thought: interesting sound. But as the album progressed, I grew tired of it very fast

Didn't care for this at all, sorry. 2 stars.

Wow… couldn’t understand much of the lyrics and didn’t appreciate the music. Unfortunately it isn’t something I can get into.

My favorite part was the band name. Did not care for the album. Their sound got tiring.

What is this awful production?

I really wanted to like this. It's exactly in my wheelhouse of indie and it sounds like it is really good. Except I just can't get over the lo-fi nature of it. The vocals sound interesting but they are so muffled it makes it hard to enjoy. The whole sound is just so muffled and fuzzy it takes away. Underneath it sounds like something I would really enjoy and the glimpses I hear of it, I really do. However the fuzziness and lo-fi nature just take over too much and it's really hard to listen to. My personal rating: 3/5 My rating relative to the list: 2/5 Should this have been included on the original list? No.

A lo-fi garage album that frankly just did not catch my attention or stand out amidst anything, just quite an empty sound for what could be a fruitful subgenre

A lot of short bursts of distortion

painful distorted guitar and mic EVERY song. IF their levels were a bit better and not as painful to listen to I'd probably rate it better.

Repeat after me: distortion is not music

Someone should let them know that the pre-demo first draft, before the words were finished, and before the songs were properly recorded, has ended up on Spotify somehow. I'm sure they'll be super embarrassed. Hopefully other providers don't have the same issue. I'm not sure if a less noise-damaged version of the album exists anywhere, but I'd be interested to hear what it sounds like recorded properly, and maybe even with a music producer nearby. There's some decent ideas here, I think, behind the noise and pop and hiss and fizz and rumble and feedback and crackle and (seemingly) broken microphones and lack of care taken to make sure the songs could be heard at their best. Quite annoyingly badly produced and recorded, but not actively offensively bad, and a potentially interesting collection of almost-songs.

Saw them open for Yo La Tengo in 2010---happen to be currently wearing the YLT shirt I bought at that show, ha! I remember liking TNV a lot and then later being disappointed at the severe distortion when I listened to this album. I love me some distortion but this is way too much.

Indie rock, lo-fi, noise pop. Ruido absurdo. Un 1.

This was pretty rough to listen to. It starts okay on the first few songs but then it devolves into inaudible screaming and chaotic instrumentals that are hard to enjoy. Overall it’s just not a good album from really any perspective, except for j guess the person that chose this album. 2.8/10

Well that was unbearable 1

You know it’s going to be good when the Wikipedia page simply exists to give the album title and track listing

It was 30 minutes of snippets of fuzzy musical noise. I wasn’t attracted enough to pick apart the lyrics. Dismissed.

I listened to all 1089 albums from the books. Now I’m on the listener suggested. This one is not even lo-fi it’s no-fi. I couldn’t discern a song here.

Ok this is mix is aggressively poor. These guitars are just grating. Holy shit what a chore to listen to.

Wow. This is so distorted that it becomes legitimately painful. The more it plays the more I'm reminded of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, in that it is something I never ever want to hear again.

1.5 It would be a lot better if they would just add a little bit of distortion to the tracks. I wonder if they have ever heard of it?

Rip It Off made my head hurt. There's just so much distortion it's hard to make sense of anything else going on. A couple of tracks tried to force their way through to interest me but the production is bad on top of so many bad stylistic choices. It's over mercifully quickly but can't earn more than 1/5 because noise alone isn't good music.

Indie rock, lo-fi, noise pop. Ruido absurdo. Un 1.