Women, Women

I’m not completely sure what to make of the intertwined, fuzzy (well, partly), messy knot of an album that is the self-titled debut of Calgary foursome Women. When it first starts, with the haunted voices, fucked-up guitars, and thwacking drums of too-short “Cameras,” I feel like I’m staring down the barrel of a reinvented VU, primitive-sounding and raw but still melodic and 21st Century-ized, a little like Comet Gain without the Britishisms. “Lawncare” takes that initial noisy scrape and morphs it into a fair impersonation of a ceaseless, relentless machine, which then subtly fades into the background — nicely done, by the way, so that I almost don’t realize it’s happening — to form a bed of rhythm laid beneath plinking, delicately insistent guitars and distant, nearly choral vocals. “Woodbine” strips away even the machinery, leaving only a simmering, roiling, vocal-less mess of feedback and noise.

And then everything changes. With “Black Rice,” suddenly me and the band are standing out in an empty field somewhere, and they’re all strumming guitars and singing sunshiny, sincere, retro, handclaps-and-all psych-pop that sounds like it slid languidly off some forgotten compilation in your hippie uncle’s back closet. What the fuck are these guys playing at, here? “Sag Harbor Bridge” makes things even stranger, dropping me headlong into a beautifully nimble, fingerpicked bit of instrumental guitar work, just echoing, back-and-forth guitars, shallow waves of synth, and a quiet bass drum thump in the background; at that point, I’m thinking maybe it’s all a fake, that the primitivism shtick from earlier was just a lure to get me in so they could carve me up with the shards of Byrds albums or something.

“Group Transport Hall” and “Shaking Hand” somewhat solidify things, however — the former is similar to “Black Rice,” but less pretty and more Clinic-esque, with a nice, driving rhythm, while the latter takes those churning, mid-fi, trebly guitars from the beginning and welds them to the fleet-fingered playing later on. Ah, I’m thinking, okay; I get it now. This is what this band’s really about. Only that’s when the trip starts to go bad again. “Upstairs” is chunky and shambling but not too overbearing, but then “January 8th” is out-and-out frantic, building towards some crescendo it never really reaches, and it leads straight into “Flashlights,” which is scattered, spiraling cycles of instrumentation winding down and down and down itself. And then it’s done.

There’s something weirdly captivating about Women — I can’t really say that I like it, because I’m not entirely convinced I do, but I’m having a hard time turning away, instead feeling compelled to bob my head to the quirky guitars and propulsive drums. There’s a magnetic pull to it, in part because my brain’s continually trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. A glance at the credits helps; the whole thing was produced by Chad VanGaalen (for whom the men of Women serve as a backing band, to boot), a guy who’s made his own musical name cobbling together bizarre piles of sound, layering his voice over it, and somehow making it work. Yeah, then it all snaps into focus and makes a kind of sense.

Not that Women are VanGaalen-Gone-Band-Sized, mind you; where his songs are like tiny, fragile icicles of melody that are pretty when they shouldn’t be, Women’s compositions really are like some kind of dangerous, schizophrenia-inducing drug. You hang on in part because you don’t know where you’re going, and sometimes it’s scary and sometimes it’s sunny, but the journey’s worth it in the end.