Camper Van Beethoven backs 'New Roman Times'

Reunited '80s college-rock favorites Camper Van Beethoven are touring the North American club circuit through November to back "New Roman Times," the group's first album of new material since 1989's "Key Lime Pie."

"It didn't pick up where it left off," frontman David Lowery said of the new album in a statement. "It picked up as if there was 15 years of us making records in between. Because that's what we were doing, we just weren't doing it together. So it's as if we had this imaginary band history in between 'Key Lime Pie' and 'New Roman Times,' and all of the stuff we'd been doing in the interim is reflected on this record."

"New Roman Times" is billed as a rock opera that loosely tells the story of a young juvenile delinquent from Texas who joins an elite military unit.

"We didn't want to make it an overt comment on the current political climate, so we made up a fictional North America in which there's many different countries that fight each other every once in a while, and Texas has gone neo-fascist and California has had a civil war," Lowery said. "The main character is a soldier from the Fundamentalist Christian Republic of Texas, and the songs follow this solider and other people through the story. But it's not really that serious--there's space aliens, and we blow up the disco at the end."

The band's lineup for "New Roman Times" includes founders Lowery, Jonathan Segel, Victor Krummenacher, Greg Lisher and Chris Pederson. It also features contributions from key Camper members Chris Molla and David Immergluck, among others.