Lake Street Dive maybe.
Also Richard Cheese has been doing lounge covers of modern songs forever as well.
The glorious Courtney Barnett is a 4AD signee apparently.
Think it’s just the Dead covers album that’s a 4AD thing, maybe. Still would be a cool match if they did sign her.
Is she always such a dead ringer (I slay me) for Hope Sandoval?
I like that Lush song a lot.
Also, the new Bob Mould album Patch the Sky is great, top to bottom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak9y2yWe82c
Yep, really digging Bob’s latest.
Later this week, new music from Woods and Trapper Schoepp. So that’ll be cool.
I suspect you’re right, looking at it in the cold sober light of day. They should indeed sign her though.
If I could by stock in the long term future of a musical artist, I think she’d be at the top of the list.
Great voice in this song, Xavier Rudd’s Follow the Sun:
Holy crap y’all.
So the album Public Strain by Women was my favorite record, bar none, of 2010. I thought it was one of the most magnificent noise pop records ever created.
Unfortunately, the band broke up about as badly as a band can break up: the Flegel brothers, Matt and Patrick, had an onstage fight (like with fists) and the band went on hiatus. The next year, guitarist Chris Reimer died suddenly.
That’s when I stopped paying attention.
So last week I’m hanging in a dubtrack.fm room, listening to some cool tunes, and someone plays this song called “Pointless Experience” and it sounds an awful lot like Women. I mean…a lot. It’s by a band called Viet Cong.
And it turns out that Viet Cong is the band started by Matt Flegel (the bass playing and songwriting Flegel brother) and Women drummer Matt Wallace. And Women’s producer is a well-regarded Canadian solo artist named Chad Van Gaalen. Viet Cong recruited his touring band’s guitarist.
And so Viet Cong is everything…EVERYTHING I loved about Women. Their self titled 7-song album came out in 2015, and it is the logical continuation of everything Women did on Public Strain. It’s noisy, it’s off-kilter. Songs feel as if they’re falling apart all over…and then outta nowhere this glorious hook hits you like an avalanche of melody and beautiful postpunk guitar noise.
Have been listening in a steady loop for a few days straight, and I can’t even.
Oh, and apparently they’re not called Viet Cong anymore, either.
Our band lives to play music. We don’t particularly like doing press, most of us are fairly private people and we have social media for the band only reluctantly. Most of us generally don’t follow online criticism. Over the last year we have essentially lived our lives in a tour van and in music venues, playing over 130 shows. In that time we’ve met many amazing people and had many great conversations with people in person.
Over this time we’ve been listening, talking and having lots of valuable conversations with the members of the Vietnamese community about the name. Through this dialogue and hearing about what the name means to so many people, we have decided we will be changing the name of our band.
Art and music are about creative expression. However, our band name is not our cause, and we are not going to fight for it. This is not what our band is about.
There are many individuals more eloquent than us who have recently had a lot to say about the topic of the name and our appropriation of the name Viet Cong. For more insights into the arguments we encourage you to read some of these. We are a band who want to make music and play our music for our fans. We are not here to cause pain or remind people of atrocities of the past.
The truth is, we’ve been planning to change the band name for the next record for months; it has not been an easy decision by any means. We are a band of four people with four individual voices; this debate has been long and difficult for us and it took time for everyone to settle on a plan of action.
We don’t know what the new name of our band will be, and we owe it to our fans to honour the concerts we have booked. We rushed into our last band name decision, we don’t plan to rush into this one, but know that will be rolling out a new name as soon as we agree upon one.
We realize this won’t satisfy everyone, but that’s certainly not the goal of this band. We never expected this kind of attention in the first place and just want to return to playing music, which is the only thing we (kinda) know how to do.
We’ve had an incredible amount of support from fans, and we have to thank everyone who has said supportive words to us as we struggle with this. As always, we welcome people talking to us in person.
you missed out on the whole Viet Cong kerfuffle, It was kind of all over Twitter and the various music sites for a bit.
Also I’m a little surprised in general that you hadn’t heard them until now, but then there is so much music these days even the most informed of us can’t keep up with it all.
Sadly, if Matt Flegel owned a gun, he’d likely be perpetually on crutches due to shooting himself in the foot.
“Let’s make a band that sounds really great.”
Yes, do!
“Let’s give that great band a name you can’t google.”
No! Gah! Don’t! That’s one of those ideas that sounds like a great stand against capitalist/consumer culture, but in the end it just makes it tough for your fans to find you.
“Whatever. We’re going to put out your favorite record of a given year.”
Ah, awesome! So great!!
“But we’re going on hiatus now.”
Wait. What does that even mean?
“We have another band.”
Oh! OK. Great!
“Because of our un-Google-able name of the original band, though, you won’t know who we are until someone plays you one of our songs, because even if someone mentions our earlier band, it won’t show up in searches.”
Ugh. This again. Well, hopefully someone will hep me to your songs.
“That’s doubtful. We chose a new name that’s pretty offensive to some folks, so in all our publicity, no one mentions our previous work. Everything’s about the second band name we stupidly chose.”
Seriously dudes. It’ took me almost a year to discover your music, and I’m a HUGE fan. That should tell you something.
“Well, we’re changing our name before our next album comes out.”
Whew. Probably the right thing to do. Loving the record you put out under that offensive name, though. Really really loving it. So what’s the new band name?
“We’re not telling you.”
<SIGH>
Damn it! Sorry, trig. I blame myself. Especially since (I think) I was the one who first turned you on to Black Rice way back when. Holy CRAP, what a song.
I’ve been listening to Viet Cong ever since Cassette in 2014 but I neglected to share it. And besides, the notion that you may not have heard of some new band is always deeply counter-intuitive.
Dudes. I’m old. I’m lucky if I recognize the faces of loved ones at this point.
Speak the heck up!
Just in case there’s Ought
and Protomartyr
Who are both kind of in the same space as Viet Cong, and search implies they’ve never been talked about here.
Also, did any of you check out that Mitski track I posted because man it’s so good.
Not yet, forge. I will soon! Love her.
The new Woods LP is streaming in full right here on Soundcloud!
Checked out Japanese Breakfast since they were announced as the opener on the Mitski tour, their album Psychopomp just dropped yesterday and it’s a nice bit of indie pop.
That’s gonna be a weird album as the other track released is very latter day Ministry.
