Times New Viking

You know your band is in trouble when it's being covered by MTV and lumped in with a movement called "Lo-Fi Punk." Fortunately, the music of Columbus, Ohio's Times New Viking does not lend itself well to vast commercial accessibility. In both recordings and live performances, the group brings a ragged sensibility that makes a virtue of imperfections and mistakes. But the band's members also write solid, catchy, garage-y punk songs and perform them with the level of abandon that made all of the truly fun music of the last forty or fifty years so vital. At first blush, their records can sound like something went terribly wrong with the recording, the performance or the equipment. But they're clearly not going for a mainstream, radio-friendly sound — more like aiming their best for uncharted musical territory.