Music Reviews
Women

Women Women

(Flemish Eye / Jagjaguwar) Rating - 8/10

Women are not Women; a point ubiquitously brought up for both clarification and irony, and rightfully so. By dismissing of a band name that attempts to evoke something pseudo-equivalent to ourselves and/or the resultant music, their title has become a trompe-le-monde just as much as the scattered debris of musical touchstones that is the record.

The brief opening track Cameras punches in with a palm-muted strum, becoming a jerky, minute-long sprint that shortly bows into Lawncare. The whimsical penchant of the opener quickly concedes to trudgy effects and icy distortion, fusing an almost industrial grind that eventually ushers in the ambient austerity of Woodbine.

Shaking Hand is discernibly the album’s most developed track (and coincidentally, the longest). It stitches together the more melodically driven elements of the record with high paced, volatile instrumentation, unhinging an effervescent, fluid jam.

While the entire Women record is saturated in lo-fi sludge, clean guitar lines float above the noisier foundation of the album in cyclical, mathematical formations. At times, the distorted haze brushes up to melodic ease, primarily depicted when the album dusts off its suit for Black Rice. Adorned with twinkling xylophone pings and the haziness of a sun-bleached photograph, this is one of a handful of tracks on the album where the otherwise rampant Dischord stylings and Don Cab mathematical articulation side-step to tambourines and melody.

Women’s self-titled debut is unabashedly lo-fi and yet, this aural aesthetic is not reminiscent of quirky bedroom recordings but instead an assertion to its brash, capricious amalgamation of ideas. Like undiscovered sounds wafting from the bottom of a warehouse, its frenetic clamour-meets-whimsy reveals each instrumentalist toggling between the most basic utilization of their instruments and the otherwise feverish allocation of their capabilities.

It seems Women have one foot in rudimentary structure and the other throwing their hat to the wind. In weaving Brian Wilson-esque harmonies with elements that tend to homogenize the Dischord catalogue, Women present a fresh lo-fi landmark that sounds like it was made in your garage before getting packed-up for a Sunday picnic in the park - well fused, lads.