Contradictions and Contortions
These apparently contradictory urges produce some of the most compelling moments on Public Strain. “Heat Distraction” is a case in point. It begins as a contorted Byrdsian pop song, a Mixolydian jangle twisted into 13/8 before breathlessly shifting through numerous key and time signature changes. Flegel and Reimer’s guitars engage in a restless dialogue, careening between harmonic unity and semitonal dissonance, while the vocals are buried in the mix, obscured by a fog of reverb. And yet, somehow, the song embeds itself into your brain: it’s catchy.
“Venice Lockjaw”, meanwhile, couples an angelic melody and twinkling arpeggios with bad trip lyrics — “One more awful feeling”; “Blood falls from your vision” — recalling Patti Smith’s take on the Lynchian aesthetic: “What’s more horrifying than normalcy?” Similarly, “Penal Colony” is a pared-back, sentimental ballad that winds its way to a gorgeous harmonic conclusion only to be smothered by “Bells”, a dense drone track built from layers of reverberating bass.
As the second half of Public Strain begins, Women dispense with pop convention altogether in favour of a more abrasive and repetitive approach. “Drag Open” is the record’s loudest, most incendiary moment. Snarling, monotone vocals compete with detuned guitar stabs, walls of noise, and a driving, thunderous rhythm section. There’s a sense of incessant forward motion but no destination, until a moment of almost unbearable tension evaporates into a hypnotic coda of Flegel/Reimer guitar interplay, each circling the other until they run out of steam. “China Steps” is a similar story: cacophonous guitars are underpinned by a motorik beat and trance-inducing bassline that drive us toward a crescendo that never comes.
While Public Strain is a record that pulls us in many directions at once — by turns graceful, savage, melancholic — it could only end in one place. “Eyesore”, the album’s brilliant climax, has an undeniable sense of finality about it. The song seems at once to incorporate and transcend everything that has come before, channelling it all into a sprawling six-and-a-half-minute denouement. While the band’s overtly melodic side has been largely deflected throughout, here it is thrown into sharp relief, delivered with crisp simplicity. After the submerged sound of tracks like “Narrow With the Hall” and “Bells”, “Eyesore” is a moment of air, its expansive guitar lines structured around ringing open strings and wide melodic intervals.
There’s an almost adolescent sincerity to the music, with its rhythmic echoes of quintessential teen-hit “Be My Baby” and its evocative lyrics about sneaking into an aquarium and leaving a trail. But again, for all its beauty, the track is freighted with an unspecific but almost overwhelming sadness. While the first half is full of movement — ebbs and flows, dynamic changes, sudden high notes — the second half falls into an extended minor-key coda anchored around a lyric shorn of its previous innocence: “You’re not lying next to me”. A spiralling riff weaves in and out of sync with the rhythm section as the track’s long tail gradually fades to silence. It’s a finalé that feels like it should go on forever.
Barely a month after Public Strain’s release, the band was finished. After months on the road, the group burnt out, splitting up on stage in spectacular fashion: punches were thrown, guitars were smashed and the band went their separate ways. This was followed by the sudden, tragic death of guitarist Chris Reimer in 2012, aged only 26.
Half the group — bassist Matt Flegel and drummer Mike Wallace — went on to form Preoccupations (formerly Viet Cong), a more straightforwardly revivalistact than Women that nonetheless retains the virtuosic energy of their former band. Flegel, meanwhile, makes music as Cindy Lee, a drag project that combines torch-song pop with blistering noise, amplifying the histrionic excess that mostly simmered below the surface on Public Strain.
Two posthumous collections of Reimer’s work have also been released — The Chad Tape (2012) and Hello People (2018) — each containing a series of solo guitar pieces and studio experiments that capture the late guitarist’s gift for composition and production. But beyond the artistic afterlives of the group’s original members, what is Women’s legacy?
In some ways, they now seem like a half-forgotten band from a bygone era. While Public Strain popped up in a few best-of-2010s’ lists, it was largely overlooked by the key outlets of the indie establishment. In some circles, though, the record has steadily begun to take on the status of a lost classic, an album whose enduring influence far exceeds its initial impact. With perhaps a little hyperbole, Ian Russell, head of the band’s label Flemish Eye, recently characterised Women as kind of Velvet Underground for the internet age: “Everyone who ever saw Women went and started a Bandcamp.”
It’s certainly true that a number of acts have emerged in recent years echoing the band’s sound — the Hecks and Ice Baths stand out as two clear examples. An enthusiastic network of online message board users has begun to collect these bands into a post-Women sub-sub-genre — Flegel-core or the Calgary Sound — with Public Strain as its ur-text.
While it’s important to recognise Women’s influence, we should also be wary of mythologising the band. Perhaps the Calgary Sound, with its emphasis on a particular locality, is a preferable label: it acknowledges Women’s singularity while also recognising that they belonged to something wider than themselves. Indeed, this is what emerges most clearly in interviews with the band and those close to them.
Its individual brilliance notwithstanding, Public Strain was the result of a collective endeavour, the product of a band sustained by the bonds of family and friendship, rooted in a local scene of independent labels, promoters, festivals, arts spaces, and community radio stations. On its release, Betz and Zoladz hoped that Public Strain might have a revivifying effect for an otherwise stale indie scene. “Women flip the bird to malaise“, they wrote, ‘and bring forth art as a “public strain”.’
Whether Public Strain had such a sweeping effect now seems rather unlikely. Nonetheless, the record nonetheless stands as a reminder that, even when taking its formal cues from the past, guitar music can still be fresh and forward-looking.
Works Cited
Betz, Chet, and Zoladz, Lindsay.“‘Women – Public Strain“. Coke Machine Glow 29 September 2010.
Colabella, Patrick, “Interview With Pat Flegel of Cindy Lee“. The Sound Between, WNYU (2018)
From Here We Go Sublime. “Celebrating 10 Years of Public Strain“. CJSR 88.5 FM (2020)
Kennedy, Joe. “Dance ‘Til the Police Come: Post-Punk Politics in 2012“. The Quietus. 14 December 2012.
Neely, Adam. ‘Why is major “happy”?’. YouTube. 2016.
‘Patti Smith and David Lynch talk Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Pussy Riot’, BBC. 14 November 2014.
Reynolds, Simon. ‘Simon Reynolds’s Notes on the Noughties: Clearing Up the Indie Landfill“. The Guardian. 4 January 2010.
Superconnected. “Superconnected Celebrates 10 Years of Public Strain“. CJLO 1690AM. 2020