Belated CMJ blogging, you may ask? It begins here. Wednesday night found me briefly at Cakeshop, there to see Alberta’s Women, whose disc on Jagjaguwar has been gratifying my noisepop receptors a lot lately. The night was hosted by the Dutch magazine/collective Subbacultcha!, and I walked in partway through a set from their countrymen Adept. The press release I got for the show invokes, among others, Liars, Suicide, and The Knife. I think I can see that, though their set wasn’t really my thing: in their favor, they were going pretty much bonkers on stage, and the crowd was definitely supportive. The relentlessly pounding beat they had behind them was less to my liking, and overall, the noise/punk/dance fusion sound that they going on reminded me of a less interesting A Luna Red.
Women’s album heads into noisy places while keeping a pop structure in place. While the same thing could be said about other bands of whom I’m fond — Oxford Collapse, Parts & Labor — Women, at least on record, opt for a more disparate approach, taking a more classically pop sound and incorporating noise as a prominent element. Live, the pop aspects of their sound take precedence — which may make for a less challenging listening experience, but also a more easygoing one. Overall, the group played a fair number of shows in the city during the festival; I only caught the one, but I’m curious to hear where their sound evolves from here, and whether the live experience or their recorded one will inform album number two.
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