Women - Women

It’s a curious name these four Canadian men have taken. If there was a definite article, or if the music were very different, you could maybe put it down to macho attention-seeking or glammy affectation. In fact, ‘women’ is simply the opposite of what they collectively are: an erasure of self that extends to the cover of their debut album, an old Felix Greene photograph of regimented, anonymous Chinese citizens.

This erasure continues in the suburban blandness of the song names and, significantly, the music itself. Probably you’d call it eclectic, but eclecticism often serves to define bands, marking them as dabblers, dilettantes or restless spirits. For Women, it’s a mask. Folk, noise, musique concrète and sun-dappled melody all inhabit this set, but origins are obscure and elements oddly unbalanced. Opener ‘Camera’ thumps and then flickers into life, an echoey hymnal set to choked hiccups of guitar, accelerating through dry, percussive booms, warm veils of fuzz and lonely old synths. It’s pretty – almost hummable – but it evaporates at the one minute mark into the heavily distorted, oddly nostalgic clangour of ‘Lawncare’, which, in turn, becomes lost in the blank throb of ‘Woodbine’.

We yield to the exquisite ‘Black Rice’, a yearning, muffled shuffle that surrenders before pop dynamics. A wonky falsetto and pealing chimes drizzle through the murk with their golden, college rock splendour. But: mystery remains. I’ve no idea who the singer is – the inlay sleeve doesn’t specify – or, in fact, how many people are singing. The mid-pitch, dislocated rasp sounds like just one guy, only with lots of reverb – but it could as easily be a layering of stilted harmonies from the whole band. You just can’t tell. Words submerge beneath deafening noise and ambient crackles; only the odd phrase creeps through, glimpsed briefly. And this record sounds old – not merely because of the vintage vinyl pops, the echoes or the Velvets-primitive technology, but also because it seems to be coming from a huge distance away. Every sound is in some way dampened and desiccated; listening to the album is like exploring a crumbling, spooky mansion that’s been abandoned for a couple of centuries – room after unexpected room of odd artefacts and antiquarian splendour reveal themselves, thick with dust. Open one door and step into ‘Group Transport Hall’: a sweet, guttering candle extinguishes itself within what seems like seconds beneath the singer’s rueful reminiscence that “you made other plans”. Walk another way and find ‘Flashlights’ – it sounds like ancient, rusty krautrock shattering under the pressure of being reactivated years after its retirement.

Not to labour a point, but the fact that these pop songs are extremely short yet very intricate (while the longer, noisier instrumentals are slow-changing and lulling) means that it’s difficult to tell how long they are in relation to each other – my CD player puts the record at just under half an hour, but had it said a quarter or one hour, neither would have surprised. If you want a more tangible critique, then Animal Collective, Jackie-O Motherfucker and White Light/White Heat are solid reference points; I, meanwhile, suspect a lot of credit is due to Chad Van Gaalan, who recorded the album. But, ultimately, attempting to demystify Women seems pointless; it’s their mystery (if anything) that defines them.

Originally published in Plan B #40: back issues available here.