Women – Women

Alberta’s Women are all men and are possibly as lo-fi as you can get. They flip-flop between largely instrumental drone-like numbers (’Woodbine’) and more sixties-influenced poppier tracks (’ Black Rice’, ‘Shaking Hands’), the movement between which unfortunately doesn’t always quite work. Whilst the “proper” songs have shades of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and early Sonic Youth about them the instrumentals are kind of sub-Godspeed, You Black Emperor! and definitely the weaker tracks on the album.

In the production chair Chad VanGaalen does a fine job capturing every string bend, each blast of de-tuned feedback and each mumble on the less straight-forward cuts; however, suggesting they drop the more dramatic jamming tunes in favour of writing an album’s worth of the poppier style would also maybe have been a good service to the group.

They tour the UK from February 13th to 17th then move on to Europe so if you live in Glasgow, London, Leeds, Birmingham or Manchester you’ll be able to see them and make up your own minds.