Album Review: New Roman Times by Camper Van Beethoven

Camper Van Beethoven began stealthily reviving their recording career not long after reuniting in 2000 -- while the official line was that their idiosyncratic 2002 re-recording of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk was an older unreleased project, as was much of the material on the 2000 anthology Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead: Long Live Camper Van Beethoven, the truth is both were recorded following the band's return to touring. However, by 2004 they decided it was time to release a legitimately "new" album, and New Roman Times was the result. It also proved to be one of the most ambitious projects CvB had ever attempted, a 20-track concept album that imagines an alternate future where the United States has been reshaped into an uneasy association of 13 separate nations, as one young man from the Christian Republic of Texas signs up to fight in a civil war that's broken out between the Northern and Southern factions of California.

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