And the Band Played On | WOMEN's sound marches forward - and dares audiences to keep pace.
The art on WOMEN’s forthcoming self-titled album is somewhat perplexing: an ominous photo depicting hundreds of people standing in rows, doing morning exercises in what resembles a public square of an unnamed totalitarian “Eastasian” country.
Look closer, though. Despite Big Brother’s attempts to turn them into a faceless horde, these people do not seem to be moving in unison. In that single snapshot, their arms fall at different angles, their heads look off in various directions, their clothes are all different styles and different vibrant colours—there are indeed individuals among this statistical mass.
It’s a fitting visual counterpart to WOMEN’s music: its members (refugees from noted Calgary outfits The Cape May and Azeda Booth) playing tiny parts) play tiny parts—individual drums, single guitar notes, cassette tapes—that add up to a gigantic, visceral whole. Fragments of resistance and change poke through the almost tyrannical marching beat like pinpricks, hints of romanticism bubbling to the surface of a still, black ocean. On the lead single, “Black Rice,” WOMEN’s commie rock shifts into the next gear and manages to sound as threatening yet calming—somehow simultaneously painfully slow and very fast.
“I don’t think we’re blowing anyone’s minds or doing anything particularly new,” says vocalist Pat Slegel. “We’re just four dudes in a compact car. I almost feel like we haven’t even earned the shows we’ve gotten. I’ve been friends with these guys since I was 12 years old. I’ve been playing music with them for the same amount of time, so it made sense to form the band. We just wanted to write music and then pumped a bunch of shit out and that’s how it sounds. I don’t know if we made a conscious effort for that or not.”
The record is lo-fi, recorded on Chad Van Gaalen’s assortment of ghetto blasters and four-tracks, and is full of tape hiss and sloppy, drunken mayhem. Amid the straightforward rhythms and the onward, driving march of the drums, WOMEN stays together and falls apart in such perfect cadence and harmony it’s scary.
“Some of the tracks we wrote two days before we recorded them, so if it sounds a little haphazard, that’s because it is,” Slegel says. But on tour, the songs have been transformed. Playing together night after night, spending days on end together, has wound the spring on WOMEN’s industrial, Orwellian beat. Slegel shrugs: “Repetition tightens bands,” he says.
