CD Reviews

Women

Women | Flemish Eye

By DEVIN KING | July 22, 2008

2.5 Stars

Women initially sound like most Beach Boys– or Kinks-influenced bedroom pop: while Pat Flegel coos like a hung-over Mike Love (“On a bleak Monday morning, holding my head/Everything tastes right, permanent daylight”), the rest of the band lumber along beneath handclaps, bells, xylophones, and a chugging floor-tom rhythm. But like recent Caribou, or even Panda Bear on Person Pitch, Women have broadened their sonic references. Minimalist guitar work (it brings to mind the tonic-based, repetitive structures of later Don Caballero), tape-distressed drums, and banged metal work together to reduce the album’s throwback feel and give an edge to the sing-alongs. Too often, however, the band either let these sounds overwhelm the songs or cobble them into throw-away vignettes that interrupt the otherwise drifting cadences. Sometimes it works: “Woodbine” is a humming drone piece with rattling silverware that works as a palate cleanser before that “bleak Monday” of “Black Rice.” And I wouldn’t mind these vignettes on their own, but on an album with some of the most exciting pop music I’ve heard in a while, they seem like unfinished ornaments.

Related: Women | Public Strain, Hanging ten or hanging on?, Holiday cheer, More

Topics: CD Reviews , The Beach Boys, Don Caballero, Devin King, More

| More

ARTICLES BY DEVIN KING

FATHER MURPHY | ... AND HE TOLD US TO TURN TO THE SUN | July 29, 2009
Harking back to an America where one's own lonely voice was the only radio and a BBQ meant a spit in the middle of the desert, Torino's Father Murphy hide detuned industrial textures within stripped-down, spacy folk instrumentation, like a man in a black hat picking up a bullet-riddled guitar with which to serenade his captives.

SOUNDCARRIERS | HARMONIUM | May 27, 2009
The first album from this Nottingham-based band is California dippy: whispered female/male harmonies, slack flutes, swinging drums, comping Hammond organs, and a bass player who finds basic funk riffs in every progression.

THE MOVING PICTURES | May 12, 2009
If one way that bands tie themselves to the past is through sonic reference — Fleet Foxes calling forth Crosby, Stills and Nash, or Animal Collective channeling the Grateful Dead — then there's been a number of bands who tie themselves to the past through cultural reference.

VARIOUS ARTISTS | OPEN STRINGS: 1920S MIDDLE EASTERN RECORDINGS | May 06, 2009
Over the past year, Honest Jon's has released three compilations culled from more than 150,000 78s of early music from the EMI Hayes Archive: music from 1930s Baghdad, early West African music recorded in Britain, and a more general compilation that moved across country lines and the first half of the 20th century.

PAPERCUTS | YOU CAN HAVE WHAT YOU WANT | April 14, 2009
Hidden under reverb and aggressive analog production, the first sung lyrics on You Can Have What You Want belie what seems to be a cheery record title: "Once we walked in the sunlight three years ago this July."