Preoccupations - New Material

Rating:

Like a therapy session on a roller coaster.

The jump between Viet Cong and Preoccupations wasn’t exactly a reinvention, because why fix something that isn’t broke? Their first two self-titled albums (obviously under different names) were feats of simmering post-punk brilliance. Tracks like 'March of Progress' and 'Anxiety' were bone-clattering, cathartic affairs; preoccupied with shaking off the shackles of alienation and disillusionment.

Much like their first two, their latest album, aptly named 'New Material', is very much like a therapy session on a roller coaster. From the word go, the album endeavours to rattle you every which way in search of an answer. But, like therapy, this isn’t a search for right answers. It’s more a search for the strength to acknowledge what is happening in the here and now. A search for any answer in the fog of confusion.

Album opener 'Espionage' begins with echoing percussion, almost like a tribal ritual being performed at the end of a long dark tunnel. Here the journey begins, drawn in by this idea of something simple albeit a something that seems so far away, warped by the echo and distance.

In the bridge of the track, and in one of the album’s most lucid moments, vocalist Matt Flegel manages to sum up the push and pull of trying to escape a void. “Change is everything / Changes everything / Changing everything / (But it’s nowhere to be found)” he sings in a voice sweeter and calmer than his usual Paul Banksian growl. It’s almost as if laying down the words that preceded it led to this moment of sudden clarity.

Yet, as with their previous two releases, Flegel keeps his eye on the darkness. The tribal ritual at the end of the tunnel seems to get further away as he loses himself over the course of the album in more obsessive and self-destructive modes. It isn’t a hugely hopeful album in that sense but, for him, acknowledging this “preoccupation” is the victory he needs.