Words by Jason Lee
Did somebody say party time?
Why yes they did and not just anyone either but the reigning doyens of Brooklyn’s party rock scene have declared it to be “party time” on their 11-part précis on the perils and the pleasures of partying in the U-S-A in 2-0-2-5 and in the name of full transparency it just so happens to be titled Party Time but don’t get it twisted cuz TVOD ain’t some Obama-era band from the sticks with nothing but Jay-Z and Britney on their iPod Touch just hopped off a plane at LGA with a dream and a cardigan nodding their heads like yeah, moving their hips like yeah, cuz ya see it’s a little more complicated than that…
…which granted the LP’s title track does celebrate the dropping of inhibitions whether thru dancing on tables “butt ass naked” or refusing to “go home” at last call, instead drinking “more Espolòn” in what’s gotta be the best rhyme ever devised around the 100% blue agave-based tequila but with interjected lines on rampant paranoia, addiction, illness, willful self-delusion and avoidance defense mechanisms which are easy to miss amidst the more dominant Spring Break ready call-and-response (“What time is it? Party time!!”) set to music humming with partytime fervor over a two-chord vamp and a hard-driving rhythm section but likewise not without its odd little off-kilter interjections like the strangulated squawking sound first heard 5 to 6 seconds in and repeated throughout with teetering high-wire keyboard and flanged, bent-note guitar tones swaddling the song in a miasma of tension-riddled unease like a hive’s worth of hovering bees waiting to sting…
…or take the album’s opening track “Uniform” which is even more up-front in wedding what sounds on the surface like a B-52s style party anthem to lyrics about being trapped in a menial, dead-end job (“I put on my uniform…learn to live with what you got”) in a crumbling society propped up by Orwellian-style oppression and Huxley-esque commodity fetishism (“throw me in the microwave / wrap me up in cellophane”) or how subsequent track “Car Wreck” makes self-immolation sound downright sexxxy (“I see the vultures / they circle around me”) what with its throbbing bass line, spy-movie soundtrack vibes, chiming xylophone and guitar solo that goes “full shred” plus the literal sound of glass shattering and don’t worry we’ll stop and let you unpack the rest of the songs on yr own all of which points to the comparative advantage of playing in a six-piece combo whose sonic reach ranging from quirkily ornate to full on wall of sound arrangements…
…all of which isn’t to doubt TVOD’s full-on commitment to promoting the righteous par-táy lifestyle despite the lyrical misgivings described above cuz as demonstrated again and again at their live shows the sextet have a preternatural ability for sending audiences into paroxysm of ecstatic abandon and exultation which is a magical thing to witness and to submit to where basically its members function like the head of a squid/octopus/hydra/other gelatinous sea creature with anyone within earshot magically transformed into one of the creature’s tentacles or other appendages—still sentient but no longer in control of one’s own movements or mental states…
…with the entire audience pogoing up and down in time, swaying and ricocheting off one another like subatomic particles in a Large Hadron Collider or maybe more like the aforementioned squid swimming in the ocean (we really oughta stick to one single metaphor!) as part of a single organism formed from the chaotic yet gleeful mélee that seems to happen almost anytime they play in public…
…cuz after all this is what partying’s all about innit, i.e., learning to let go and cede control with the help of booze ’n’ drugs or music ’n’ dance or Bacchus ’n’ Dionysus or whatever works for ya with these outside forces leading to the release of pent-up inner drives ‘n desires otherwise suppressed by “polite society” perhaps as a means of keeping the have-nots in a chronic state of self-alienation and vague or not-so-vague dissatisfaction if you wanna get Marxist or Freudian about it (we dunno which, witch!) with powerful consumerist interests rushing in to fill the void selling knock-off replacement parts for the parts of yourself you’ve lost which makes the very act of partying hard a potentially radical act of resistance within this context so remember next time you get totally off yr tits yr doing it for the good of society mmmkay…
…just as we’ve witnessed at TV Eye and Our Wicked Lady and other venues besides with people losing their freakin’ minds whenever TVOD play their absurdly propulsive tunes with a sheer abandon that’s damn near infectious potentially leading to a contagion of jerky, uncontrollable movements in the muscles of the face, arms and legs (call it TVOD-itis) and heck even when they played freakin’ NYU-adjacent Washington Square Park this past Friday at the very first Showbrain showcase of the season and before long the Tyler and TVOD had a small throng of peeps flailing and perambulating around a modest mosh pit in broad daylight but one where singers get carried around by piggyback with literal squeals of joy and rapture on the faces of the dancers and some of the watchers too (mere passers-by moments earlier) at being so completely overtaken…
…and sure while there’s no shortage of musicians skilled at writing partytime anthems and at moving a crowd some and at mixing in some more melancholic numbers ideal for the partytime comedown, TVOD’s special skill is in combining the two into one with practically every track on Party Time precariously perched between elation and angst in pursuing partytime full-time with the single-minded commitment of the seeker while not ignoring the quest’s antecedents nor its potentially grim consequences, a dynamic which seems very much in keeping with the project’s time of origin and here we quote from a recent interview with Tyler in an online publication fittingly called The Decibel Decoder…
TVOD started when I began writing these fast, dancy distorted songs in the basement of my old apartment on my Tascam 4-track right before the pandemic started. At the time there was a lot of very serious shoegaze music happening in Brooklyn where people would stand around like comatose zombies at shows, so I really just wanted to make music that I could dance and mosh with my friends to. It was just me, the 4 track and a Casio drum machine at first and then I started to enlist my friends that were musicians in the local New York scene.
We formed in late 2019 right before shit hit the fan. We played a couple of shows before the lockdown happened and we were supposed to play at that year’s SXSW. I was let go from my job on 14 March 2020 and then spent the next couple weeks feverishly making demos in my little DIY home studio wondering if the world was going to end or if I would ever play another show. I released Daisy which consisted of the recorded demos I made those first few weeks of the pandemic. I then got really into motorcycles and blew all my money on an old 1971 Honda CL 350. I definitely lost my mind a little without live music. It was a scary time for sure, and I’m so glad shows are back.
…with the Daisy EP (2020) to our ears capturing the insular intensity of the early days of pandemic lockdown with songs about corporate-banking-as-codependent-relationship and disco punk that actually sounds more like No Wave and tMidwest business travelers in NYC with the opening lyric of the opening track (“Party in the Disco Hut”) describing the impulse to “self medicate / through the hard days” over plodding drum machine, discordant guitars, electronic bleeps and bloops and sine wave swoops like a malfunctioning ATM machine…
…whereas the follow-up Victory Garden EP moved towards a more organic live-band kinda feel but it’s only with Party Time that anything approaching the raw power and frantic vitality of TVOD’s live sets has been captured on wax or translated into ones and zeros in large part due to the songs gestating for so long and being fully field tested by the band in the interim before recording then more than ably captured by producers Félix Belisle & Samuel Gemme at Gamma Recording Studio in Montréal, Canada who we’re just guessing would be the first to tell you that they’ll never be the 51st State cuz Francophone homies from Québec don’t play like that…
…while still maintaining the darker undertones and socio-economic awareness of those early singles and EPs (TVOD’s two pre-pandemic singles, “Wallmart” and “Buy. Sell. Die.” occupy a more punkish anti-capitalist screed territory) which we figure gives Party Time much of its frisson with all of these elements rubbing anxiously and excitedly up against one another with a song like “Wells Fargo Bank Account” (found on all three LP/EPs!) evolving from the hushed eroticism of a boy and his Tascam pondering the S&M subtext of remote banking on Daisy with Victory Garden’s version translating the originals’s electronic throb into a high-lonesome ballad that’s been blown up into a sneering hard rocker on Party Time moving from a burbble to a (literal) scream in protest of being “fucked” by a financial institution in more ways than one w/the earwormy hook popping off equally across all versions…
…and we gotta say despite their evolution it feels as if TVOD are still stuck in the summer of 2021 and thank Gawd for it preserving the outsized partytime vibes of a city dancing precariously on the jetty at a party celebrating the reopening of the world or at least having its last (will and testament) grandest Going Out Of Business sale and no matter whether the partytime vibes in question are mere escapist fodder or a means for furthering the revolution we’ll happily keep huffing the fumes of 2021 so long as TVOD keeps supplying them…
…cuz arguably there was still a modicum of hope for humanity four or five years ago as people however briefly pulled together and more fully appreciated simple pleasures like going out to a see a packed live show nd dancing with total frenzied abandon with total strangers turned into friendly acquaintances and friendly acquaintances turned into good friends if only for the duration of the night so let’s all party like it’s 2021 cuz 2025 so far pretty much sucks eggs and yes the still overpriced ones that helped get us into this whole mess…
…and speaking of suppliers here’s a little tidbit o’ TVOD trivia we stumbled across that’s kinda fascinating even if we don’t fully glean its meaning tho’ we got theories as always (!) relating to the LP’s previously mentioned opening track “Uniform” which opens with a curious lyric about how “I don’t care what 8 is for / 5 6 7 9 and 10” that directly echoes a sample found at the beginning of “Heaven (Flipper)” off the debut EP with a voice asking “Whattaya sell?” to which a gravelly voice replies after a pregnant pause, “Eight!” which as it turns out is a audio clip from a classic Sesame Street sketch (see below) from The Street’s gangsta era featuring a fedora-wearing muppet who may or may not be Kermit’s sketchy drug-dealing uncle approaching the ever-credulous Ernie and trying to sell him the seemingly illicit number 8 stashed under his overcoat like it’s a felt gateway to party time debauchery and altered states with the salesman offering various ludicrous reasons for making the purchase which even our stripey-shirted “Friend of Burt” doesn’t fall..
…and what’s more consider how the number “8” is basically an endless loop (turn it on its side and it means infinity) whose two sides play off from and feed into one another just as turmoil, tension, disenchantment and just plain ol’ boredom may lead one to seek partytime in equal measure as seeking a sense of anticipation, exhilaration, and potential enlightenment through partying where partying all the time only swings the pendulum back and forth all the more forcefully in a seemingly never-ending Möbius strip of dread and desire feeding into the same equation…
…tno’ thankfully, much like the Children’s Television Workshop, TVOD have a great sense of satire-based humor about such things and don’t get too inflamed over matters natural to human nature almost as if it were summer or fall 2021 again versus the more grievance and vengeance-based politics of our present so maybe it’s a good time to just draw the blinds and listen to TVOD’s Party Time on repeat day and night ad infinitum til you pass out from sheer exhaustion and who cares if you get fired from your job or deserted by yr friends or lose your entire family cuz partying properly is a 24/7 vocation and taken aurally you won’t even need to feel guilty the morning after cuz the guilt’s built in plus if you never stop there’s not even any such thing as a morning after…
*******
Party Time released on May 9, 2025
Music & Lyrics by Tyler Wright
Tyler Wright – Vocals
Jenna Mark – Synthesizers, Vocals
Serge Zbritzher – Guitar
Denim Casimir – Guitar, Vocals
Mickaela Piccirillo – Bass
Elizabeth Wakefield – Bass
Michael Karson Pahl – Drums, Synthesizers, Vocals
Félix Bélisle – Synthesizers, Percussion
Samuel Gemme – Synthesizers, Percussion
Produced by Félix Belisle & Samuel Gemme
Recorded by Samuel Gemme & Félix Bélisle at Gamma Recording Studio
Mastered by Richard Addison at Trillium Sound Mastering
Artwork by Tyler Wright