For the first time, I found an off-kilter album that intrigued me and begged for me to listen more and more. It was oddly built, creative, and most of all, brilliantly written. This album was Public Strain. Neither of us could make sense of the vocals since they were buried deep enough into the instrumentation for them to be, for the most part, indiscernible. For months, this album stuck with me. It was always in the back of my mind. Come December 2010, we were getting ready to choose the winners of our Fowries. There was no doubt in anyone else’s mind that this was going to win Best Rock Album, but when it came time for our album of the year podcast, I was ready to fight for Before Today by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. As the recording progressed, however, my perspective was beginning to shift. I had more to say about Public Strain than anything else. It was the first album I was willing to throw down money to have on my record player. So, John and I filed our votes for that and the rest was history, or whatever you want to call it.

Before all that noise happened I was scheduled to see Women live in Santa Cruz with a couple buddies of mine. At this point, I did not have a drivers’ license and I was relying on one friend to get me to this show for about a week. My friend Danny was in the bay area for the night and was prepared to meet me and the friend that was supposed to drive us to the show. At the last minute possible, the driver bailed on me and I was unable to see the show. About a month later, the band’s efforts were put on an indefinite hiatus. That is the show I think about missing all the time.

It’s been over a year and a half since I first heard Public Strain and I consider it one of my favorite albums, probably ever. In that year and a half, I went through both my junior and senior years, graduated high school, and underwent one of the worst situations I’ve ever had to deal with. I still adore everything about Public Strain. It didn’t receive a bunch of press, a standing ovation from the community, or Best New Music. It was 2010′s dark horse; an outlier.

The night Christopher Reimer passed, I was spreading to a bandmate my oft-spoken hope about the potentiality of the band getting back together. He said something that now strikes me: “They should get their guitars out again and make some more music. They’re probably still tuned exactly the same way.”

The deadline we set for all of this was last week. No one wrote anything (me included), and it seemed like that’s the end for that idea. At the same time, I’ve still felt urgency behind writing something about Women, as it’s been over a year since their meltdown. The sadness from reading that turned to jealousy at a certain point- what an amazing thing to just throw away. At the same time, I’ve got no right to say something like that, since I wasn’t someone that actually dealt with the people in the band. All I have is my perspective.

That perspective was informed by the awe-inspiring work Women had done. When I first heard their self-titled record, I disliked it. Not because of the music, but because I felt like I was missing something. I waited a year, and expanded my musical knowledge further and further before going back to it in the summer of 2009, and was promptly floored. In terms of songcraft and soundcraft, it was worlds beyond anything I’d heard.

After spending a year listening to that record basically daily, news of a second album broke. The months until it surfaced were unbearable; I was constantly looking for any sign of it or any songs at all. Eyesore came out officially, and blew me away for being so structurally unlike anything from the self-titled record. Locust Valley slid out unofficially, as far as I can tell, and was comparatively ornate and precious. And then, gold. I found it on a music sharing service, over a month before it was to be released.

Now that I’m here, I’m really not sure what else I have left to say about Public Strain. We devoted a podcast to it, gave it our awards for Best Rock Album and overall Best Album of the Year. There’s no way we can praise it more than that.

After the release, I was lucky enough to see them live. For as beautifully constructed as that music was, it held no candle to their delivery in a live environment. Everything had more energy and nerve, and instead of being showmen, all they had to do to have a good show is demonstrate “yes, we made that music, and we can do it at any point.” The case in point being Shaking Hand. On record, it’s an agile and oddly jointed song. Live, it’s a consuming wave. The ingenious songwriting took a seat behind the superhuman musicianship. Witnessing the outro live is something I’ll never forget.

That earth shattering moment was nicely balanced with the news of their meltdown about two weeks later. Now that memory has a twinge of luck; that I was able to see them before what I knew as Women stopped. I thought it was a tragic ending.

But you know why I’m writing this by now.

I’ve got no booze around to have a personal wake, so instead I’ve written this in memoriam. Reimer’s work enriched my life and gave me direction, something to aspire to be. And he was only three years older than me, for fuck’s sake.
Rest in Peace.

CHAD VANGAALEN – PEACE IS ON THE RISE

(Diaper Island – 2011 – Flemish Eye/Subpop)

My video run-down for Canada Day 2011! Expect another video post every hour, all day!

(There are some Canadian ones here, but they are mostly just music videos that I like).

R.

Actually, scratch all that. Aside from producing the critically acclaimed album Public Strain (an album who’s support tour rather ironically put a great deal of public strain on its creators Women) and developing a new, more spacious recording set up, Mr Chad VanGaalen has been working hard on a brand new album of his own.

The world of listeners will be treated with Diaper Island via Flemish Eye on May 17th.

Until the due-date arrives, VanGaalen has agreed to assuage our hungry ears with a single which the Flemish Eye website describes as ‘the album’s heart’.

Hear ‘Sara’ below.

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F13974727&show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=192434
Chad VanGaalen – Sara

R.

Album Review — Women, Public Strain

by Brett Salinas

Women have always been a band of contradictions. Blending sleek, tight songwriting with unpredictably experimental riffs. After every blissed out nugget of pure, feel-good pop, the band leads us down a darker, more uncertain road where their rock-leanings start to weigh heavy. On their self-titled debut, the band found itself having a harder time negotiating the space between these two worlds. While each track fit one way or the other, the album felt somewhat polarized and at odds with itself. On Public Strain, Women are more comfortable in their own skin. This sophomore release finds a much more mature and confident band fleshing out their sound and effortlessly collapsing the line between the experimental and the pop.

If their first record was a cursory exploration into the genre, Public Strain finishes what Women started. Here, each song is given time to gestate. From the languid, yet sonically ripe opener to the poetically optimistic closing track, each song feels like more of a complete statement. Where earlier tracks like “Cameras” or “Group Transport Hall” felt staunched by the band’s somewhat gratuitous brevity, songs here like “Heat Distraction” and “Locust Valley” are able to harness the band’s pop-sensibility while still fostering that wandering sense of discovery that makes the band flourish.

Public Strain also leaps ahead of the debut in its much more evolved sense of grandeur. Each song here sounds bigger, more resonant, and, most importantly, more emotionally charged than ever before. On “Venice Lockjaw”, the band shows itself not being afraid to be vulnerable and sincere.  The gentle strum of the guitar, the understated beat, and the earnest but never mawkish vocals flow like water in this ballad. Each delicate little pluck of the strings feels like a drop of rain falling outside while someone lies in bed with you and tells you their deepest secrets. This is somewhat of a new territory for Women, one that they fit into beautifully. With this newfound sense of emotional intensity, the album feels more poetic and cinematic, and hits with much more impact.

There is one unfortunate flaw here, however. “Penal Colony” sits in the middle of this album like a dead weight. The repetitive, tedious beat, the half-baked melody, and the unimaginative sonic arrangement languish in this track, and to no good end. As Flagel croons “faces start to blend/meets a sudden end/ and you’re gone completely”, it feels less like a wistful, nihilistic meditation and more like a sad, pretentious cliché.

Having said that, Women have crafted an outstanding second album here. Public Strain is still very much loyal to the band’s signature sound, but further investigates what they are capable of. While the songwriting expands and wanders deeper into new territory here, the album ultimately feels tighter in scope and vision. Every rough edge from the debut is deftly smoothed out on Public Strain. As the wall between the traditional and the unpredictable slowly crumbles away here, Women show us that there is a very powerful and exciting space in between.

If You Like “Eyesore” Check Out:

• “China Steps”-Women
• “Desert Sand”-Beach Fossils
• “We Can’t Handle It”-Art Museums

Here is what Women’s manager, Ian Russell, had to say in an official statement:

“With a heavy heart, we regret to say that the band Women is exhausted and are in need of a break from touring. They have experienced a lot of stress recently, and this culminated in a disastrous public conflict on Friday. Band members have been suffering from poor health, and are in near-exhaustion; as of today, all upcoming shows have been cancelled.

The band would appreciate some privacy as they sort things out and recover.”

Women have canceled all of their tour dates including their 25-date European tour that was due to launch this week. Check back to ModernMysteryBlog.com for updates on Women’s future.

Sometimes the weirder your influences are, the better off your art is.

Take the newest full length from Women, Public Strain – the first time I put it on (a few days ago) it confused me endlessly.  The first track, drumless and squawking, sounded like the introduction to a band who wore their influences like a sandwich board on Michigan Ave: the tortured viola of the Velvet Underground’s “Black Angel’s Death Song” dubbed over Loveless-era EPs by My Bloody Valentine.  A likeable formula, but also an overdone one.

Then the second track came on and I found myself face-to-face with the brashness of Polvo mixed with the jangly and endearing asymmetry of Deerhoof.

The third track: 60s pop-via-Stone Roses filtered through Public Image Ltd’s “Metal Box” soundscape.  Fourth track: Beach Boys melody over the dark chords of Low.  Fifth track: the throbbing warm blanket of MBV fuzz.

At first the artwork did little to garner my attention, but after a precursory listen (and confusion) I looked to it for clues.  Of course the clues were obscured in a sepia snow drift, but that seems to be what Women is aiming for.  It’s a flurry of big names and big sounds, just like the haze of a white out.  There are big flakes in this snowstorm.

Another important point to make here is that there are still people in the artwork, no matter how shaded or minuscule they are.  They may be losing their battle with the elements, but their presence is still there.  We instantly notice them and it absorbs us into the work with sympathy.  We’ve all had an unfortunate confrontation with nasty weather, and that’s crucial.  It decides how easily the viewer can become part of the work as a whole.

Are you in that frigid blizzard, or are you just looking at it?

“Narrow with the Hall”
“Drag Open”

Let me start by saying that headphones are a must with this album, though you should probably start with the volume a little further down than usual or you’ll probably make a face.  That said, the experience does change when you’re engulfed by the sound, even if it means the “bitter beer face” makes an appearance.

The first sample is the third track, listed above as “Stone Roses meets PiL”, but you’ll definitely experience it the other way around.  The first sound you hear before anything is a buzzsaw feedback humming.  Even once the vocals kick in, they’re dripping with reverb.  This is the blizzard, and through the snow you see a sunny billboard for the bouncy sound of the Madchester scene.  Underneath the grime is a peppy 2-minute pop song – you just have to steep yourself in the noise to really hear it.

The second is a later track that caught my ear when I first heard it.  Again the noise comes first as staccato yelps, but this time what emerges from the noise is a propulsive backbeat.  Everyone moves in unison and repetition, and the energy echoes both early and late post-punks.  At about 2:40, everything sort of breaks down and slows to an even sharper focus.  This is when is becomes clear what the influence formula is.  It’s the nervous stutter of Wire during the first half of the song and the last half pays homage to Sonic Youth, particularly on their 1987 album Sister, and even more particularly on the song “Pipeline/Kill Time”.  The passage between the two sounds is never distinct, but the evolution is apparent.  We never see the seams unless the band wants us to.

The tracks are not an exercise in originality, but they do serve a purpose as an exercise in catharsis and sympathy.  Each passage of groaning feedback and drifting squalls serves to draw your consciousness into a state.  The white noise and repetition becomes the album’s hypnotic weather, and sooner or later you find yourself in a similar state to those little black figures on the cover.

Tracklist & Review (Allmusic)

Each song sounds like some weird, combined kind of languid heroin high as might have been produced by some 1960s band operating in the orbit of acts like Velvet Underground, whose drugs of choice were opiates, as opposed to psychedelic and modern shoegaze-worshiping bedroom projects. The album is detached to a detriment, like listening to music being played next door. The band keeps its distance from the listener; which is unfortunate, because the breathy delivery of the vocalist makes you wish you were beside him and able to see the beauty in the decay around you.

Public Strain opens weakly. “Can’t You See”, “Heat Distraction” and “Narrow With The Hall” are no match for the latter half of the album. “Can’t You see” gives you a bass line and a plaintive chorus which cries “can’t you see” like a spurned lover with an overabundance of production that produces a bed of noise that coats the song like an oppressive fog, diminishing the listener’s visibility. “Heat Distraction” starts off a bit better, mutating, perhaps even evolving as the song continues, yet whatever distraction the song provides is not present when “Narrow With The Hall” immediately makes you recall the opening track’s familiar noise and distance.

“Penal Colony” and “Bells” are where the depth of the album really begins to manifest. Soft but not demure, the distance is accentuated with calm melodic guitars given a near choral quality whose verdant blanket of guitar carries over to the whole of “Bells”, making these two tracks everything which the first three are not. Here, the arrangements are endearing and lull you to a near dreamlike state of comfort and security.

“China Steps” leads off the second side of the album and it is probably the strongest single song on the album, as guitars and bass bounce back and forth from one another complimenting and antagonizing each other’s parts.

It’s here on the second side where the instrumentation really shines as the band opens up, moving away from the dead-voiced goth-gaze vocalizations as the album gains speed and energy, as much amphetamine-fueled and paranoia-filled as opposed to the previous side’s codeine, vodka mixers which slowed your heart to a stop.

Public Strain is a good album whose unfortunate tendencies at the start prevent it from escaping a nebulous sort of rating. It’s somewhat unique in that it doesn’t sound like other similar purveyors working in similar genres. Women’s ability to mix moods and themes as well as the antonymic, baroque and bare hopefully spells a long future for them as a band.

Public Strain

As they established on their debut, Partick Flegel (vocals/guitar) and Matt Flegel (bass/vocals) are masters of subtle modal changes and off-kilter melodies. The ability to balance aggressively experimental passages with clearly developed and slightly anachronistic-sounding pop sensibility was one of the most exciting elements of that first album. On Public Strain, this balancing act is still present; but while the original effort yielded a playful collage effect, due in part to the lighter subject matter of the songs, the contrast this time between ambient noise and recognizable structures serves to heighten the dramatic resonance between tracks, or even between such shifts within the songs themselves. “Drag Open” begins with a chaotic thrashing of guitars, anchored by impassive vocal interludes, until about the halfway point, when it abruptly but fluidly transmutes into a languid, alluring and unforced refrain.

This album is not laden with hits in the traditional sense. In fact, the armature of Public Strain is constructed much like a classical sonata, building force through the exposition of related themes at the front and back end, with a transitional interlude in the middle. The strength of any one song would be compromised without the support of those around it. With that said, “Narrow With the Hall,” “Untogether,” and “Locust Valley” are all catchy enough to stand out in a crowd, but it’s the nuance of these tracks that ultimately determines their aural and emotional impact. In their brightest moments, some of the songs are redolent of Beach Boys harmonies, or the fierce, psychedelic garage rock of Thirteenth Floor Elevators. The production value of Public Strain, however, retains a far-away sound that ultimately washes over these recognizable traces of musical pedigree, and is thus closer in spirit to the work of more experimental antecedents like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine.

Saving the best for last, “Eyesore” is the most complex, emotionally stirring, and assertive song on the album. It jumps around for the first three minutes, obstinately refusing to settle on any one consistent structure, tone, or melody for long before building to the crescendo of an intoxicating guitar riff that evinces the claustrophobic, anxious beauty of the previous tracks. Irresolvable, or simply too mesmerizing to conclude amiably, it closes to a fade-out, serving as a perfect counterweight to the album’s nebulous opening notes.

- Devin Dobrowolski

(Thanks to yvynyl)

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More Women on Beachtapes

reviewed by Michael

When your album has additional vocals and instruments and is recorded and mixed all by Chad VanGaalen, then you know your album is going to be pretty sweet. And this couldn’t be truer for Women (the band, not the gender).

Public Strain is the sophomore release for this Calgary band and it is filled with a lot of lo-fi instrumentation, distortion and extremely deadpan vocals from vocalist and lead bass player Patrick Flegel.

Immediately you will be drawn into Women’s spell with the opener “Can’t You See” which seems to slowly build up tension as the song progresses. This is quickly contrasted by “Heat Distraction” which is a lot brighter yet still very intense.

As it moves onto “Penal Colony” and the instrumental “Bells,” the mood grows very much sombre, which seems to fit in perfectly with Women’s sound.

Public Strain finishes off with “Eyesore”, their first single from the album and an epic in itself.

There really isn’t too much more I can say here- the eleven songs that make up this full length are very absorbing and even hypnotic, and if that isn’t enough to win you over than just be impressed by all the cool things this band does with their instruments.

Top Tracks: “Heat Distraction”; “Drag Open”

Rating: Proud Hoot (Really Good) +*swoop*

Their second album, Public Strain, will be released in Canada, via Flemish Eye Records, and in the United States, via Jagjaguwar Records, on September 28th, 2010…

It’ll be every man, woman, and child when Women play the Hemlock Tavern with Manchild on 10/23/2010…

Women – Eyesore

http://www.flemisheye.com/

http://www.myspace.com/womenmusic

Women – Public Strain

First of all – I want to say RIP to those who lost their lives on this date in 2001, at the World Trade Center.  I hope for the highest blessings to your families.

On this slightly subdued day, I have a pretty dope album #2, from Calgary’s Women (the band is actually all male…lol.)  It’s probably in line with noise pop/post rockish acts like Wavves, Animal Collective, and Deerhoof.  So if you’ve been feeling those particular bands, and others like them, this effort is probably in your wheel house.  It’s sort of space out and noisy, with a good amount of abrasiveness found in this niche.  On the first listen, I didn’t know how to take most of it…so I listened I again this afternoon, and I felt it – you have to listen a little deeper with this album.  I’ve been listening to some different things lately…so it didn’t make sense at first.  Now it does – recommended.

Women

Krazzy good 60s garage pop perfection from Canada’s Women… latest track, psyche pop treat Narrow with the Hall is taken from the group’s debut album Public Strain, out now on JagJagWar… Sweet as!

* Be sure to check out the group’s earlier track Eyesore below too, an absolute must!

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Play :: Women – Narrow with the Hall

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Play :: Women – Eyesore

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* More Women on Beachtapes

Women – Eyesore

When I caught word Women were preparing to release a new album, that I was set to review it, and that it was to be produced by my personal hero— the enigmatic Chad VanGaalen who also produced their previous album— my expectations were high, to say the least. But instead of a musically-induced orgasm, I was left with auditory blue-balls. Interestingly enough, the incessant droning sound that fills the album and is supposedly music is remarkably similar to what you would get if you gave electric instruments to a handful of chimps. If I wanted to hear something so offending I would have picked up Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music instead, which showed the world that there is a difference between music and nonsense sound 35 years ago.

Their previous album was like a lovely little wedding with good cake. However, if this album, Public Strain, is the honeymoon, then it is equivalent to you and your newlywed bride hopping on the wrong plane and getting stuck vacationing on a windy ice-flow rather than on the sunny beach you had intended.
On September 28 Public Strain is set to be released, but you could just stay home instead. I know I will be.
..Remi Watts

Public Strain

Heat Distraction:

Tracklist:

1. Can’t You See

2. Heat Distraction

3. Narrow With The Hall

4. Penal Colony

5. Bells

6. China Steps

7. Untogether

8. Drag Open

9. Locust Valley

10. Venice Lockjaw

11. Eyesore

(Click on image for download page.)