AWmusic

Numerous associations spring to mind when coming across a band named after “the fairer sex”. Primary ones being that this could be a group of agitprop feminists, satirical jocks or even lovers of the Charles Bukowski novel of the same name. In fact, Women are an all male four-piece from Alberta who have just released a hissing and vibrating 29-minute lo-fi tour de force called, erm… Women.
Recorded in the same basement that produced this year’s wonderful Soft Airplane album, with the help of Chad VanGaalen and an arsenal of wonky old tape machines, and centred around the nucleus of the 60s art-rock clang of “Black Rice” or the spiky guitar squabbles of “Shaking Hands”, Women (for a debut) contains an uncommon mastery of the kind of dissonant tangents that usually make you want to press skip on your music player (but don’t) and the type of melodies, that make you feel like you’ve heard them before (when you haven’t.) In its most transparent and over zealous classification Women by Women is the sort of album that could be placed between that legendary white record with the banana on it and that famous green one showing awkward looking non-surfers feeding animals at a zoo, that is if you like put your music collection in an anal chronology of pop versus the avant-garde.
Voices crack with patented punk ennui, drums beat like the hearts of hyperactive children and guitars chime away like unholy church bells, but nothing on this record seems out of place or wilfully perverse. Even the de rigueur ever-present lo-fi tape-hiss, so often used as a misplaced form of authenticity, is happily overwhelmed by the sound of songs being played, rather than just being recorded. “Group Transport Hall” with its vocal harmonies and sweet glockenspiel or “Cameras” in its pleasing metallic chug are perfectly delivered in a mere minute, with little room to contemplate the hiss and thud of wonky recording techniques. The ends justify the means when the ends comprise the sound of a band that is willing to experiment, include three instrumentals on a debut and finish an album with a great big squall of noisy nonsense.
Pretty melodies may turn into ugly noises and an ugly racket may become something beautiful, but that’s ok, it’s all part of the same compelling potential. There is a lineage of the immediate and the not so immediate co-existing quite happily on most of what has been called classic, at one time or another, and maybe Women will one day belong to that lineage? Right now, your internet search engine may not be able to find the name of this band without dredging up a deluge of inappropriate material, but after hearing this record you’ll probably want this moniker to permeate beyond the lexicon of Pitchfork related blog/websites and maybe even end up on top of the first page of a Google search, as unlikely as that may be.

Women – Black Rice
Women – Group Transport Hall

Tags: album