[rating=7.00]
Alberta-based Viet Cong pairs two members of the defunct band Women with two guitarists from associated groups. The first album from this mutated collective is heavier than past projects, driven by dark-sunshine hooks and jarring mid-song maneuvering.
The seven songs that make up Viet Cong feel like twice as many, not because of their length but their shape-shifting detours. Some bend two or three or four times before they suddenly end. Take the six-minute “March of Progress”: its first half is a throbbing, distorted drum-synth loop that finally breaks when Matt Flegel begins singing over a repetitive snippet of sitar; “March” then turns yet another corner, rushing in step with Mike Wallace’s hi-hat. There isn’t a breath of air or a moment unoccupied.
And that goes for Viet Cong as a whole. It’s an exhausting listen, but in the way that a rigorous physical workout is exhausting. Count “Continental Shelf” among the first great songs of 2015; it is brief and bleak, and somewhere between melodic and monotonous. This lineup, intact for a couple of years now, retains Women’s ’60s garage and psych influences but pushes into harsher, no-wave territory, twisting it with post-punk and metal (some of the members played together in a Black Sabbath cover band). These genres crash together in strange, compelling ways. The remarkable solos from guitarists Monty Munro and Daniel Christiansen towards the end of “Bunker Buster,” lock and spar in a way similar to the Verlaine-Lloyd duels of Marquee Moon-era Television.
That droning vocal of Flegel’s, who also plays bass for Viet Cong, has never sounded more buried in reverb and fuzz. That might be why his few audible lines—particularly “If we’re lucky we’ll get old and die”—sound more like wanting than warning.
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