Bygone Shows

Alberta's fantastic WOMEN, recently signed to Jagjaguwar, bring their garage-wonderfulness to the 5th Element (email julia@ticktick.org for directions to the venue).  Zombie-weirdos!!!!!!

BIG NEWS --  We've just added the fantastic local support of THE VACANT LOTS and RYAN POWER to the bill.  So if you've never heard of WOMEN, you'll come out to see these amazing dudes, and then be blown away by Women as a sweet surprise.  To Truman Peyote, sadly they couldn't make it, we'll see you next time!!

The debut album by Women was recorded over 4 months on ghetto blasters and old tape machines in Chad VanGaalen's basement, an outdoor culvert and a crawl space. Sometimes light and spacious, at other times eerie and dense with an ominous weight, this self titled album touches upon Velvet Underground, Swell Maps or This Heat while not really having any obvious precursors - a lo-fi masterpiece cloaked in layers of vibrato and guitar wash.

Noisy and claustrophobic songs smash through junkyard trash brawls while others lift and soar across the landscape of 50's-informed pop; a contradiction and an enigma, the debut album by Women will find its way onto summertime pool break-in boombox mixes and the turntables of record store devotees.

Women is Patrick Flegel, Matthew Flegel, Michael Wallace and Christopher Reimer, and the four young men live in Calgary, Canada.  Their album is released on Flemish Eye in Canada, and Jagjaguwar in the USA.  Friends since childhood - two of them brothers - the band has an intuitive rapport that seems to transcend speech from years of playing together. The members of Women have collectively toured North America and Europe in various projects. Members have played and toured as part of Chad VanGaalen's band, and two members moonlight with Absolutely Kosher artists Azeda Booth.

    they had lived by night  after the Flood  after the Wilderness…before they learned to weep…a rhythm generates coagulating into prose. 
hands abused by work. minds abused by Time.  deep memories are cast from the terrible shore. less black the dark of night than the eyes of Fate...  the hour of my sad twilight has come.  the immense weight of time...situated on the screen.  close-up.  black & white.  fades.... exiled from love. the scale of things.  the existence of Death was a primary source of religion.  internal equilibrium.  dead upon the seashore. thrown into existence. the meaning of the word. Genealogy to be created & recreated endlessly. reinvented if necessary. Salvation an end in which there was no means save Art.  man awaits daily pardon.  man’s eternal dwelling place lies in his deceit.  the oracle has come in endless streams of vomit...filled w / a sensation of grief & Boredom…far removed & distant like a planet detached & disillusioned like the night unable to discern the melancholy which penetrates the heart. the Spirit moved...endless cattle w / faces worn. the need for survival. death instinct. the senses dull useless.  the herd need somebody to follow.  remember we bathed ourselves (in moonlight) remember we closed our eyes (at dawn).  seamless curtains torn & laced in moonlight at dawn. we end up sleeping next to bodies we will never really know. despite the nights alone & the days on fire (no more tomorrows) the end of superstitions...Uncertainty is just a way of being inefficient.  what if edgar poe wrote a rock n roll song.  Aeolian procession in midnight flight a feeling you can hear. there is always something new in your development towards an undetermined end.  I want to reenter life.  out of the tomb & into the womb.  (or is it the other way around?) 8 times the vowel O appears.  Listen…we have arrested our senses. we have enslaved our attention. will we never find ourselves again?  we must reassume our dreams in the infinite Alchemical night where life is no longer continually lacerated.  extend the voice.  liberation is the key.  the hour has come. the broken universe has draped over us the new dawn. no longer a tomb for a bed. extend the voice. it’s time to reevaluate our values. hear the voices that language forsakes.  there may be no other passage thru time...

Ryan Power's music does not read as indie rock which basically means white rock at this point (see S/FJ's A Paler Shade Of White if you haven't already); it doesn't read as indie rock which arguably really isn't rock. Not because of cellos or loop pedals or toys or arpeggio-heavy arrangements instead of regular whatever but because of no good-old-American miscegenation.

Ryan's music doesn't read as white but it doesn't exist in some "post-racial" neutral zone either. It mixes like they used to do. It's not "eclectic", it's not "postmodern", it's rock 'n roll, it's hip hop.

Ryan was born with a deep feeling for black music (blues, soul, Hendrix) and the level of soulful nuance he can conjure is so FUNKY the mind blinks alive and a minimal dance twitches into the leg. Of course he's a sensible liberal but this isn't politics, it's feel.

Perhaps ironically, as a reluctant jazz student at the University of New Hampshire in the 90s (fear of a life at the Merrimack gas pump led him to the music program at the state school which he never really enjoyed) he tended toward white jazz (west coast shit, Bill Evans) and dude even liked James Taylor. He's just following his ear; the economical grooves of these white players just appealed to him. Also Brazilian shit big time, more and more Latin American sounds appear in his music, bossa nova lately giving way to outright salsa.

Look, Ryan is just a better musician than most of us and also not a chicken about just liking what he likes regardless of the current fashions which we're getting too fucking old (32) to give the shit about we never did anyway in our better moments. The best of a world of rhythm and harmony (like Lennon or rap his melodies mostly spaceship the maps of the former and latter networks) just comes out, borrowed and changed in new ways you didn't think of.

Fuck indie rock. Long live the elegant mixmasters: slender, subtle, sexy, and killing with all the new guns which aren't guns. Is It Happening? Yes.

(from Camp Studio)