Music

Times Neue Roman invite you to ride in their Vehicle

by Erika Jarvis

Photo: Jalani Morgan

It’s the best week in the world to be Times Neue Roman. The Toronto hip-hop duo have just released their first full-length album, Vehicle, and are sipping whiskey in a friend’s barbershop to celebrate. Two days before, Mayor Rob Ford admitted to smoking crack cocaine, and through some delicious, insane coincidence, an early Vehicle single called “Late Night” has a video where party kids cavort in Rob Ford masks, even doing lines.

“We were like, ‘Who’s the face of this city?’ And then we decided to be as literal about that as we could be,” explains Times Neue Roman’s rapper, Arowbie, a brainy guy with large tortoiseshell glasses. The video came out a year before Ford’s spectacular revelations, almost to the day.

Depending on when you start counting, Vehicle took up to five years to complete and exists as a website as well as a download. It’s stuffed with live instrumentals—rare for modern hip-hop—in part thanks to Times Neue Roman producer Alex The, an intense dude and part-time drumming teacher enviably able to bash out his own beats on command. As a rapper, Arowbie’s rhymes are dense and layered like a box of tissues, as in “Sade Is In My Tape Deck,” a tribute to driving music: “Hop into the whippersnapper / system banging / Little Dragon / playing from the slipper slapper / cinematic / in the track,” and so on. The album’s uncontested banger is “So Many Females,” with its creeping, groping bassline.

The rest of the album, however, shares a similar pall to “Late Night” (such as “Come Find Me,” a stuttering descent into dubstep), and manages to feel very of-this-town whilst belying Toronto’s rather beige-ish image abroad.

Now “Rob Ford crack video” is an international search term, Vehicle is experiencing a cozy moment with the zeitgeist. “While I’m happy to talk about Toronto love,” says Alex The, “whenever you hear this city mentioned, it’s never about the dark side. Says Arowbie, frowning into his whiskey, “that track’s had a really weird life.”