The eponymous debut album from Viet Cong is one of my favourites of this nascent 2015. Reviewed here, the record connects a series of dots to form a complete image in my mind’s eye of great appeal, threading string between points resonating with the heavyweight raucousness and addictive melodic edge of acts like HEALTH, the pre-No Age outfit Wives, Ought (who I saw them play with, in London, last year), Liars and… Oh, I don’t know. It’s not exactly new, this stuff, but it plays with my senses like a first-time buzz. It consistently lifts me out of my seat, even when crackling into life through shitty laptop speakers.
Most coming to Viet Cong – okay, sorry, that’s a terrific assumption. Many coming to Viet Cong will be doing so because of band members’ previous form. Frontman and bassist Matt Flegel and drummer Mike Wallace were in Women, whose two albums – a self-titled set of 2008 and 2010’s Polaris Prize-nominated ‘Public Strain’ – attracted ample acclaim and positioned the Calgary foursome as ambassadors for reinvention within indie-rock circles. They confirmed a hiatus in early 2011 – rumours flew that there’d been an on-stage fight in October 2010 – and the passing of guitarist Christopher Reimer in February 2012 effectively sealed Women’s disbandment.
Flegel and Wallace are joined by Scott Munro on guitar and keys, and Daniel Christiansen on guitar, for Viet Cong. Heard on record, they’re a powerfully cacophonous force, brutal percussion on album opener ‘Newspaper Spoons’ coming close to industrial doom heard hanging over Birmingham sometime in the last decade or two. The following cut, ‘Pointless Existence’, is similarly (compulsively) bleak, albeit more in the mould of an Interpol offering left out in the endless rain too long, its edges weighed down, its droop manifested through such positive lyricism as: “If we’re lucky, we’ll get old and die.”
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‘Silhouettes’
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Heard live, though, Viet Cong are lighter, breezier, if not particularly fluffier. A foursome that enjoys a joke on stage, they’re clearly not a bunch of misery guts – and, indeed, their record goes on to reflect this as it progresses. ‘March Of Progress’ is a pastoral, psychedelic whirlpool of infectious guitars that shine like the sun, and ‘Silhouettes’ fairly romps along, propelled both by icy keys and fiery riffs.
“Stumbling is involved, a lot of the time,” says Flegel, of Viet Cong’s live sets and their different atmosphere to the record that each performance is drawn from. “I end up having to engage with the audience in some way or other, usually with misplaced words and half-drunken, jokey banter. I understand how ludicrous it is to be standing on a stage, trying to express yourself, while everyone watches and gauges whether or not this was worth their hard-earned money. We are real people, though, and yes: we are fools.”
There’s little foolishness to ‘Viet Cong’, though. Shot-through with a very prominent darkness, despite its side-steps into the kind of uncommon accessibility that marked the work of Women, it’s not an easy listen for anyone who figures indie-rock to be whatever fellow Canadian Mac DeMarco’s putting out this week (as good as that most probably is).
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It’s definitely a good outlet for some of my bleaker thoughts… [This record] sounds like the windows are boarded up…
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“It’s definitely a good outlet for some of my bleaker thoughts,” says Flegel of the band. “With Women, we always had a very cold sound, but always with a bit of sun coming through. Whereas with this band, and this record in particular, it sounds like the windows are boarded up. Having Monty (Munro) and Danny really brings in a whole new set of energies and influences.”
Which is why, even from a distance, you’d be hard-pressed to confuse ‘Viet Cong’ with a Women record, even with the unmistakable tones of Flegel at the microphone. “There are some fairly oppressive noises happening, yes,” the singer says of the album’s general tone. “But as a lover of pop music, I think that melody naturally comes out in my songwriting. But, I find great pleasure in dissonance, and I think having that makes the consonance pop out a little bit more. Like, you can’t see beauty if you’re never seen the ugly to compare it to, you know?”
I know. And at just 38 minutes long – enough space for seven songs, some of which lock into a pattern of hypnotic drone – ‘Viet Cong’ is an album that most will be able to appreciate in a single sitting. I don’t really buy into the listener of today having less time to commit to new albums, that attention spans have stuck new shallows, but it doesn’t hurt to be a new band putting out an LP that’d fit easily onto one side of a C90, with space left over for B-sides.
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‘Continental Shelf’ (contains nudity)
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“These seven songs just made the most sense in sequence, and kept the album to a friendly length,” says Flegel of the writing and recording process. Also, anything longer than that and you start losing sound quality on the vinyl – and, as record nerds, we took that into account. I had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted the album to sound like from the get-go, and we went into the studio with 90% of the songs already demoed.”
Fans in the UK will get to see these songs in the flesh – and perhaps a few jokes, too – when Viet Cong return to these shores for a run of dates in February. They’ll be playing dates on the continent, too, which leads me to ask about the way British promoters treat bands compared to those over the Channel.
“Yeah, the UK promoters’ motto is, ‘If you’re lucky, you’ll get crisps and die’. Really, though, some grease and a case of shitty beer and we’re right in our comfort zone. We’re excited to be playing in the UK again, and hope to do so as much as we can in 2015.”
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Words: Mike Diver
Photography: B&W by Colin Way, colour by David Waldman
Viet Cong online. ‘Viet Cong’ is released on January 19th through Jagjaguwar. See the band live as follows:
February
4th Oslo, London
5th Manchester, Deaf Institute
6th Broadcast, Glasgow
7th Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
8th Green Door Store, Brighton
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