Camper Van Beethoven are back. Camper Van who? Okay, these were the guys who kick started the whole college rock thing in the US in the mid-eighties along with folks like Black Flag, Husker Du, The Minutemen and Sonic Youth and provided an eager and self-consciously geekish fraternity of bedsitters, bedwetters and art students such hopelessly shambolic masterpices as ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’ and ‘Joe Stalin’s Cadillac’. It was funny at the time in an intelligent, screwball, ‘hey lets do the show right here’ kind of way. It was also ostensibly all rather punkish and radical. But times change and before long their wilfully shambolic disgraces began to test even the hardiest of nerds and campers (a note for note reworking of Fleetwood Macs’ entire ‘Tusk’ album saw to that) and the band faded into deliberate (but not altogether, unforgiving) obscurity. As someone in the band wittily laments, the band ‘didn’t explode but dissolved more like a urinal cake’. And what better epitaph for a band that did indeed sound like they’d been hastily put together after a casual jam in a men’s urinal.
This time round, however, things are slightly different. Moving on from the ‘surrealist absurdist folk’ of old to a far more superior and mature alt-country feel, the band have managed to craft one of the most consistent and oddly moving records of their career. Time may not care about them. We may not care about them, They may not even care themselves, but rather than being the catastrophic and desperately unfunny satire on the Bush administration the album promised to be (on paper at least) the New Roman Times is as restrained and a subtle a rock opera as you’re likely to get this side of ‘The Wall’ or ‘Tony Gets His Kicks Out Of Playing Political (But Ultimately Tragic) Mind Games With Militant Fundamentalists’. Telling the story of a young Texan who joins an elite military unit, gets wounded, takes up drugs and defects to the other side, the feel and tenor of the album is not unlike Pink Floyd’s quietly sardonic ‘The Final Cut’ – in that whilst there’s plentiful doses of heavy, guitar and violin driven prog there’s also a vein of calm, melodic tenderness (‘That Gum You Like Is Back In Style’, ‘Sons Of The New Golden West’, ‘Civil Disobedience’). In fact, if you were to draw any immediate parallels, you might put forward the spaced-out melancholia and phlegmania of Sparklehorse or Daniel Johnson. It’s Americana, Jim, just not as we know it: skewed, politically left and generously peppered with all manner of Mexican, ska and reggae nuances.
Okay, I’ll hold my hands up; it may not be as perfectly realised or as well rehearsed as Pink Floyd’s ‘The Final Cut’ but nor is it as patronizing or as smug, and if you’re willing to give them a chance gently grinding rockers like standout track ’51-7′ may actually yield no small degree of pleasure.