Times New Viking’s sense of timing here is pretty serendipitous, given how the much-ballyhooed return of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart has put fuzzy mumble-pop back on the public’s agenda again. In an enormously over-crowded genre littered by saminess, Dancer Equired makes a decent fist of standing out from its contemporaries, but then you’d expect that from old hands like TNV for whom this represents their fifth full-lengther. By their own scratchy standards, they’ve softened a little, with Dancer Equired lacking the abrasive trebly scree of much of their earlier work, which has, I guess, robbed them of one of their most satisfying ingredients, but which has also undoubtedly made them a more listenable prospect. Don’t worry though, they still sound grubby as fuck, to the point where you actually start to wonder if the likes of Ways to Go and Downward Eastern Bloc are a willful attempt to wind up the audiophile zealots to whom the mere mention of 192kbps is akin to cheerfully shitting in their shoes. All in all, Dancer Equired is nothing we weren’t really expecting from Times New Viking, but it's good murky fun all the same.
3.5/5
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