Women - Public Strain

A few weeks ago, my friend gave me a burned copy of Women's new album, Public Strain. From the first listen they were doing things that really excited and moved me. After many more listens, I have a pretty consistent reaction to the album. Basically, half the album I think is wonderfully beautiful, and the other half falls flat for me. Even though I can't love all of the album, there are four songs on it that make Women my favorite current band, and those songs are enough for me to disregard the ones I don't care for. Getting straight to the punch, those four songs are "Heat Distraction," "Locust Valley," "Venice Lockjaw," and "Eyesore."

The real occasion for me writing this post, though, is that I just read Talya Cooper's review of Public Strain on Dusted. At this point in my life, Dusted reviews more often than not piss me off. Cooper's first and foremost surprised me, and then mildly pissed me off.

Her first paragraph opens with the suggestion that Public Strain derives from nostalgia, defined as a disdain for the present, fear of the future, and yearning for order, constancy, and safety. This blew me away because I definitely don’t associate Women with those things. Yes, I do hear a lot of throwbacks to oldies harmonies and melodies in their music, and I also hear a lot of other musical influences coming through (Television, This Heat, and Wire, especially). They are an interesting band in part because they’ve got one foot rooted in the past, and their other foot is a very forward-thinking foot. Yeah, their other foot has a brain because Canadians have brains in their forward-thinking feet, duh. That’s what makes Canadians so great. They think with their feet, whereas Americans think with their cheeseburgers. [JK, that’s a non sequitur. Americans and Canadians are both great.]

All joking aside, Women is an eclectic band that tries their hand at lots of things, with varying degrees of success as far as I’m concerned. You have to go back to their first album, Women, to get the picture of where they’re coming from. I don’t want to write 10 pages on this, which I could, but that sounds painstaking and hard. Basically, their first album has lots of stellar things going on, but they also equally do things that fall flat for me. There’s also not a lot of coherence production-wise to a lot of that first album, which can be cool. Public Strain, however, is much more cohesive from a production standpoint. Everything fits together pretty well.

On Women, in their most ambitious songs, they have a tendency to come up with very overwrought structures and guitar parts. It can be exciting and interesting to hear, but to me those ideas end up falling flat emotionally. They are neat ear and mind candy, but they don’t speak to me. The big triumph on Public Strain is that those four songs that I love so much have shed that overwrought compositional baggage of the first album. These new songs are so powerful emotionally.

Let me now quickly connect those four songs to what I like about the band Television. A song like “Heat Distraction” reminds me a lot of the sound and style of Marquee Moon. Both Television and Women (on those four songs, mind you) manage to write songs and arrange these songs for two guitars, bass, and drums in a way that channels so much powerful emotion.

Now, Cooper in her review of Public Strain seems to dislike these songs because they feel like nostalgic retreads of some average-sounding indie rock bands from the 90s. I haven’t ever listened to June of ’44 or A Minor Forest, but I did take Cooper’s suggestion to check out their sound clips on Google. I can hear where Cooper is coming from in the musical similarities to Women, but I have to say that Women sounds way better than those bands. It would be interesting to do a more in-depth musical comparison between June of ’44, A Minor Forest, and Women, because I’m sure we would see that all three bands are doing something pretty different from one another and that Women is distinguished from those bands musically in a way that is more complex than just being at a faster tempo.

Cooper says Public Strain “tries too hard.” That’s something I can agree with about Women at times. Certainly some of the songs on their first album try too hard, like I’ve already said. But with those four songs on the new album, I just don’t think you can say they tried too hard when the results are so fulfilling to me. I mean, hell, I’m in a band which I write songs for, and I’d certainly like to think I try very hard to write songs that I’m happy with. Some people have this odd idea that music should just flow from some inner spring of the human soul and that applying any kind of conscious effort to compose music is untrue to the creative impulse. Well that’s wrong. There’s a difference between trying hard and being overwrought. When you try hard, you get beautiful melodies, chord progressions, chord voicings, guitar tones, vocals, ensemble playing, and emotional impact such as “Heat Distraction,” “Locust Valley,” Venice Lockjaw,” and “Eyesore.” Those songs manage to not feel overwrought to me. There’s a naturalness about them. But yes, Women walks a fine line between getting just the right balance and being overwrought.

Moving on. Cooper says that Public Strain succeeds in its moments of bleakness. I disagree. She seems to love the songs I dislike and dislike the songs I love. That’s why her review was so surprising to me. To me, “Bells” isn’t that great. I also didn’t care much for “Woodbine,” their analogous drone composition from Women. I’m not a drone hater, but I just don’t happen to have much of an emotional reaction to “Bells.” I will compliment it on its harmonic movement though. It’s funny how Cooper calls “Bells” the most current-sounding song when, to me, it further shows Women’s admiration for This Heat, a band that was doing mysterious and beautiful electro-acoustic improvised pieces back in the late 70s.

“Can’t You See” and “Narrow with the Hall” both get bogged down by production techniques in my opinion. They would be very moving songs as far as I’m concerned if they stripped away the sound collaging in the former and the wall-of-guitar in the latter. Now if you haven’t picked up on this by now, I am making these claims based on my emotional responses to these songs. I’m not going to go into more analysis than that. I can only say that “Can’t You See” and “Narrow with the Hall” don’t bring me to transcendent heights the way the other four songs do. I’d like to see Women arrange “Can’t You See” and “Narrow with the Hall” for a more live band approach. I’ll bet you I’d like them more.

“Penal Colony” is another great winner, and I don’t really have anything against it. For some reason though I just don’t like it as much as the other four.

We then come to the middle of the album, which really falls flat for me. “China Gates,” “Untogether,” and “Drag Open” don’t really strike a chord with me. Cooper says that in these bleaker moments the album is at its best. I simply don’t agree. “China Gates” falls into the overwrought category. It drives in a cool way rhythmically, but the chord progression and the voicings of the guitar parts feel really awkward and unsatisfying to me. The second half of that song tries to change things up by reharmonizing the song into a brighter sounding major tonality. That song just feels half-baked, more like a sketch, not as fully realized as the other four songs.

“Untogether” is alright, probably the most pleasing of the three middle songs to me. It just doesn’t thrill me the way the others do. I don’t have anything very critical to say about it.

“Drag Open” grates on me, and not just because it’s a dissonant song. I’m not a big fan of the bass line or the drum part. The guitar parts are decent, though I don’t care for the guitar tones a whole lot. The second half features a very Sonic Youth-esque plateau of gentle guitarscapes. Women do their trademark “nothing can be in straight-forward time signatures” approach by having a repeating melody in 15/4 time. I’m not outright dismissing their tendency to use odd time signatures in their song constructions, but it definitely is one of the ways in which they walk the fine line of trying hard and being overwrought. At their best moments, Women write structures that feel natural in spite of the odd time signature changes.

With a song like “Locust Valley,” the odd chord progression feels very natural. Granted, they aren’t playing around with changing time signatures, but it’s just the oddness of how the chords move from one to the other and the repeating cycle. I can relate to that style of writing. You just don’t think about it in terms of “what would be really weird to do right now?” Usually it’s a matter of following a line and letting the musical logic determine itself. Unusual results will happen, and they will be very musical. Women allow their music to follow its own lines of logic in beautiful ways. If anything, I get the sense that on the four golden songs of Public Strain, Women are more and more allowing their music to be what it is. Women are becoming more comfortable letting its music falls into traditional patterns at times, and Women are feeling less compelled to rifle around with the music’s logic. That’s just my sense. Maybe Women don’t relate at all to how I see this.

In the end, I have a totally different reaction to Public Strain than Cooper. I don’t really know where she’s coming from or what she likes in music, but that must inform why she has the opposite reaction to the one I have. My personal opinion about Public Strain is that it would be blindingly powerful if it were released as a four-song EP featuring “Heat Distraction,” “Locust Valley,” “Venus Lockjaw,” and “Eyesore.”