Women
Women
Jagjaguwar
By Jose Fritz
On July 18th, Rusty listed off four albums under the heading “Best New Music of Right Now” on the SIS blog. I was instantly jealous of his discovery of the band Women. It was original and great. He had beaten me to it like a hunter tracking an animal then happening upon a splayed carcass, previously hunted, butchered and harvested. The travail was over with no trophy, just stained snow and rank steam. Rusty, in an act of instinctive self-preservation, passed the review to me.
There have been a number of recent bands naming them selves for the fairer sex: The all-girl summertime fun band Ambitious Career Woman, Girl Talk, Zombie Girl, Velocity Girl, Airport Girl, Used to be Women… the list goes on. Many of them are just sustaining themselves on the remnants of 1960’s pop, but Women are so much more than that.
Women lay waste to the extant indie-rock zeitgeist. With zeal and vibrancy they deconstruct the Velvet Underground and Swell Maps. They gently combine the most arcane of Atari sounds with a fuzzy lo-fi aesthetic that would offend Phil Spector to the core of his being. The sound intermittently explores every possibility in indie rock irony: spacious vocal harmonies paired with glockenspiel and undercut with toneless dead drum sounds.
The album rambles down the longest hallways of art rock. In songs like “Lawncare,” they achieve the trifecta: discordant, abrasive, and repetitive. The song contains not a moment of melody or consonance. The drums pound a single 8th note over and over, harsh guitar chords wash over it ablaze in distortion and reverb. There is a single melody, but it’s in a dissonant key.
The tension is incredible. The song is immediately followed by “Woodbine,” an utterly minimalist experiment in drone. In the context of art student exhaust like “Woodbine,” it’s almost disconcerting to find songs like “Black Rice” that are as melodic as Archers of Loaf and as lo-fi as Goldenboots.
In 2005, when Chad VanGaalen put out his solo album Infiniheart, I wrote him off. I didn’t think, didn’t expect that he was capable of something this developed. But only three years later here we are. This album in all its palimpsest fury feels like a continuation of Chad VanGaalen’s most recent effort, Soft Airplane. That fragile Neil Young quality rolls through both albums. And yet years older myself, I have begun to appreciate the spaces between the notes and pacing other than frantic, frenetic and febrile.
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