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.

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