Berube Communications

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN
return with a new album
“New Roman Times” (Cooking Vinyl)
Irish Release 8th October 2004

Indie-rock’s founding fathers Camper Van Beethoven are set to release a new album NEW ROMAN TIMES in October 2004, its first since 1989’s Key Lime Pie. The record is a political rock opera: it loosely tells the story of a young Texan who joins an elite military unit, is wounded becomes a drug addict and eventually defects to the other side. Although the band had many lineup changes over its years, NEW ROMAN TIMES brings back the classic CVB lineup of David Lowery on guitar and vocals, Jonathan Segel on violin, Victor Krummenacher on bass, Greg Lisher on guitar and Chris Pederson on drums. Other key members along the way such as Chris Molla and David Immergluck also lend a hand to the proceedings.

Camper Van Beethoven formed in 1985 in Santa Cruz, CA, and went on to help create the historic, still vibrant scene known as indie-rock along with other luminaries such as Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, The Minutemen and The Bad Brains. CVB’s self-described “surrealist absurdist folk,” put the post into modern as its genre jumping antics brought humor and levity to this heady scene at its most nascent stage. From “Take the Skinheads Bowling” to “Joe Stalin’s Cadillac” to inspired instrumentals to covers of songs by Sonic Youth, Status Quo, Pink Floyd as well as a note for note rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s seminal Tusk in its entirety, CVB always thrilled their fans with their freewheeling iconoclasm. By the time they made Key Lime Pie however, song craft and maturity replaced the band’s early more sardonic and mischievous ways, and it’s there from which the work for NEW ROMAN TIMES picked up and began.

“Someone somewhere said Camper Van Beethoven ‘didn’t explode but dissolved more like a urinal cake,’” Lowery shares. When the band regrouped for a series of shows at New York City’s Knitting Factory in 2002, the fact that they felt like great rock performances rather than exercises in nostalgia encouraged them to think about taking it all one-step further. Besides the fact that their old songs sounded “oddly modern,” it was their “sideways political commentary” that felt relevant again.

“This last element more than anything encouraged us to try to make a new record,” says Lowery. “It took two years, lots of discussions, lots of songs, lots of recording and the occasional show to get something that we thought would pick up where we had left off.”

When contemplating why CVB came back to write a rock opera, Lowery states: “We felt we had to go beyond what we had been doing before. There was always an element of progressive rock that had always been in our music. In the new recording this got amplified, and once you start playing around with prog rock, it’s just a short step to ‘concept album’ or even ‘rock opera’.”

Although Lowery is admittedly perturbed by the ways of the Bush administration, the roots of NEW ROMAN TIMES run much deeper than merely being inspired by America’s political climate. Lowery wanted to tell his story from the point of view of a soldier because he has a certain “affinity and empathy” for them based on the fact that his father as well as many of his uncles are military veterans. Obsessed with making sure his tales were based in fact, he actually visited military chat rooms and got soldiers, some serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, to give him commentary on weapons and weapons systems.

“But this story isn't really supposed to be about Iraq, Afghanistan or even war,” he notes. “It’s actually about the deep gulf between the ‘red’ and the ‘blue’ parts of the country. I made it a sci-fi alternate reality so that I could exaggerate the differences. Plus I could make things lighter and more tongue in cheek.”

Only CVB could get away with trying to make light of something as sad as what’s going on today in the world. And as with the best comedy, NEW ROMAN TIMES succeeds because it taps into real truths in incisive ways while being entertaining and fun.