Review Summary: "We're all reluctantly engaged."
Since their outset as a foursome, Preoccupations (FKA Viet Cong) have imbued their clamorous, lurching conglomeration of post-punk and indie-rock with distinctly industrious overtones. And while the first half of their 2014 demo,
Cassette, was largely dominated by bar-pleasing jangles, 'Structureless Design' and 'Select Your Drone' on the back half--consisting of rusty guitar tones screeching atop cold, mechanical drum thuds, all in conjunction with front-man Matt Flegel's nihilistic lyricism and delivery--would foreshadow a bleaker, more ominous direction that the band would pursue and fully articulate with the release of their thundering self-titled commercial debut the following year. From the opening moments of that album, it was evident that these men had abandoned any and all desire they may have once had to sound catchy and accessible:
Viet Cong took the sonic and structural experimentation that
Cassette merely flirted with to another level entirely, whilst simultaneously managing to muster a sharper focus on songwriting--exploring themes of social alienation, urban decay, monotony, emotional dread, and futility. Their physical output apparently mirroring that of their industrious musical qualities, the band is back once again only a year later with another full-length, now under a new name--the direct result of somewhat expected internet outrage toward their objectionable original moniker--with an updated visual and sonic identity to go along with it.
Before you've even finished removing the plastic wrapping encompassing
Preoccupations, the cover art is an immediate tell-tale of some of the new sounds contained within. First of all, its primary colours are light-blue and white, which starkly juxtaposes the black and white of their previous cover. Correspondingly, the sonic palette here is decidedly brighter and less abrasive than that of its predecessor: the main riff on the verse of 'Monotony' is damn-near a dream-pop melody; 'Stimulation' sounds like the soundtrack to a sunny-day-trip to the beach, albeit while on amphetamines; the synths on the chorus of 'Anxiety' almost twinkle in the gloom; and the apex of 'Memory' is one of the most beautiful, uplifting movements of any song in 2016. As a result,
Preoccupations at times possesses an approachability and optimism that
Viet Cong preferred to dismiss with a cold shoulder. Secondly, as is evident by the graphic-design oriented artwork, the band have apparently not only accepted the inevitable march of human progress that their last record openly sneered upon, but are embracing it. This drastic shift in visual-art direction manifests itself in the widespread implementation of synthesizers on display. And though they've been present here and there from the beginning of their discography, aside from a couple of outlying tracks, synths have only been used to provide supplementary, background-instrumentation up until now. It's an adoption that's hard to look past--seven out of nine of these tracks employ synthesizers as main melodic features--and certainly leaves a pronounced impact: much of the unbridled velocity and din that their guitars once provided has been replaced by the nostalgic tones and simpler figures of the synths. And while these two tangible shifts are welcome in the sense that they shed new light upon the quartet, exposing facets we have only seen glimmers of thus far, they're also a step back in that they've forced the band to release their vise-grip on the cacophony that suffocated their last full-length, and was a large part of what made for such an exhilarating listen. That said, this sonic metamorphosis does provide them with an opportunity to affect us in some novel ways.
The record begins with 'Anxiety', which opens with a radiant drone-prelude until a fat, grumbling synthesizer bursts forth in 13/4, and is joined by front-man Matt Flegel's detailing of a state of--you guessed it--anxiety. The song later shifts into a bridge that uses a more straightforward time-signature and adds one of the album's only noise-based sounds into the mix, as Flegel links these sentiments to his mental state post-
Viet Cong, which clearly hasn't been good--"I'm spinning in a vacuum/ deteriorating to great acclaim". This lyrical pessimism is more or less carried throughout the rest of the album, however it's not always congruent with the music that supports it. Case in point, the following track, 'Monotony', employs gorgeous guitars that stretch out to touch the skies of "blue, translucent days" that it speaks on. It transitions seamlessly into 'Zodiac'--so seamlessly, that they could have just as well consolidated these pieces into a single track--which consists of equal parts electric and electronic instrumentation, and showcases the band playing with some real urgency for the first time since the needle dropped. The first side closes out with the mammoth, 11-minute finale that is 'Memory'. Despite similarities in length, it's certainly no 'Death'; its emotional frequency is on the opposite end of spectrum, and seems to contradict everything essential to the band up to this point: as previously mentioned, it's actually
uplifting. Featuring a pseudo-linear song structure, it begins with a relatively mellow verse-chorus-verse-chorus passage, with a resounding line that forecasts some weightier material--"you don't have to say sorry for all the things you failed to do/ you don't have to say sorry for all the times when everything fell through". After the second time around, the song switches gears and begins to gather momentum for the beautiful, climactic resolution that ensues. Atop a driving 4/4 drum machine beat and a melodic tandem of guitar and synthesizer, enters the trembling falsetto and lower-register of Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner, slowly singing, "our loneliness arrives by satellite on time/ and the signal of memories between both sides", as the track unfolds into the love-song that it ultimately is. Soon enough, Boeckner is joined by Flegel alongside a towering tremolo-picked guitar, and together they sing, "erasing your memory/ our particles collide and drown by candlelight". It's a truly arresting passage, the best on the album, in fact. Finally, the pinnacle dissolves and we are left with a gently washing, but all the while slowly crushing drone-movement--an opportunity to decompress and reflect after what is one of the strongest opening halves of any LP this year.
The back half on the other hand, unfortunately fails to maintain the height of the benchmark set by its antecedent. It starts off on a promising note with 'Degraded' though, whose opening movement contains four overlapped, slow-moving, shimmering synthesizers that, in conjunction with a quick, nimble drum pattern fading-in, serves as an overture until the song quickly snaps into focus. The main section of the song employs blisteringly paced bass-work throughout, as well as a prominent post-punk synthesizer melody in the chorus. Lyrically, it's one of the most focused efforts in the tracklist, about conceding to the alleged futility of attempting to push the upper-limit of our human forms--"we're absolutely obsolete/ intolerant and overheating/ leaving our footprints in the concrete"--and with the political landscape of the United States the way it is today, it's hard to not at least consider his point here. The following cut, 'Sense', is a short, subdued interlude, which would have served its purpose perfectly as a breather-track, if only it were not directly followed by yet another interlude-like piece, 'Forbidden'; back-to-back, this pair of songs produce a glaring flaw in the structure and flow of the second half. The especially frustrating part is that the last 15 seconds of the latter really ramp-up, and could have been an excellent launch pad for a regular-lengthed song, but the way it abruptly fades-out the momentum that is built-up makes for a noticeably awkward attempt to transition into a higher energy-level in order to segue into the penultimate track. Whatever amount of thrust was generated is certainly needed though, as 'Stimulation' is simultaneously the brightest and most high-velocity cut here, featuring a mesmerizing math-rock passage near the end that follows Flegel's liberating proclamation that "we're all dumb inside/ all dead inside/ all gonna die", making for one the of most riveting, communal passages of the record. Finally,
Preoccupations comes to a close with 'Fever', a mid-paced synthesizer track, which despite its disappointingly vague chorus line, serves to wind the album down while providing some decent layered melodies and textures; it's not bad per se, but it's somewhat of an underwhelming finale, especially when you juxtapose it with that of their last effort.
But in the end, despite its second side's shortcomings, the band's name change, and their corresponding shift in sound,
Preoccupations is absolutely a welcome addition to FKA Viet Cong's steadily expanding catalogue. And though it isn't able to eclipse the might of their last release--undoubtedly their magnum opus thus far--if you count the two albums released as Women--the forerunner to Viet Cong, consisting of two of their members (Matt Flegel and drummer Mike Wallace) which dissolved following an onstage fist-fight between Flegel and his brother--as an extension of their discography, then at the very least it's yet another assured step in cementing their legacy within the sphere of quirky indie/noise-rock of which they've been orbiting for the past 8 or so years. In a recent interview regarding the band's tireless output as of late, Flegel said, "Really, there’s no one telling me I have to put a record out every single year. At all. But at this point, it’s kind of my main focus because I just want to keep it rolling, you know?" Well then, going forward, let's hope that he and the rest of the band are able to maintain that sentiment for years to come.
