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Stereogum - Music

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Stereogum

21.01.2025

Preoccupations' 'Viet Cong' Turns 10

When the end of the world comes, what will it sound like? Will it be something familiar to our ears — the terror of what we know all too well? Or will it be an unfathomable horror that never even crossed our minds? On their debut record Viet Cong, which turns 10 today, the band now known as Preoccupations root around in the uncertainty of our obliteration. The Calgary post-punk band have always existed as translators of a sonic past and interpreters of the present moment, building from forebears like This Heat and Joy Division for an apocalypse entirely of their own era. Call it weaponized nostalgia, if you must. I choose to see it as violent distortion, a shifting of angles and sharpness to fit new wreckage. Of course, this is getting ahead of the beginning of the story. Preoccupations came as an offshoot of the jangly post-punk group Women, a quartet with Pat Flegel and Chris Reimer on guitar, Pat’s brother Matt on bass, and Mike Wallace (no, not that one) on drums. Women dissolved just as quickly as they came about, lasting three short years before getting into a vicious onstage fight. Fists were thrown, shit-talk was uttered on mic, and Reimer himself remarked in the fervor that it would be the band’s final show. Tragically, his comment came true; Reimer suddenly passed away the following year in his sleep. With that tumultuous end to Women, the remaining members split off in two different directions. Pat Flegel started a project of their own called Cindy Lee, part loving homage to ‘60s doo-wop and garage rock, part elusive drag act. Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace, on the other hand, went an entirely different direction. Recruiting Scott “Monty” Munro and Daniel Christiansen as dual guitarists, this new band went further into the rougher edges that laced Women’s production. From their earliest days, when they were operating under the name Viet Cong, they sought to sketch out untapped darkness for a new generation of post-punk. I don’t want to mince words: Viet Cong is one of the most significant records of the 2010s for me. It’s certainly among the best of the best when it came to that decade’s crop of post-punk revivalists, of which there was no short supply. But even among the works of other great bands like Protomartyr and Priests and Ought and Savages, there’s something still so thrilling about Viet Cong as a record. With only seven tracks and a fairly short runtime, it bombards you with the full force of its might and gets out before the shellshock sets in. It’s simultaneously compact and sprawling, expansive and suffocating, panicked and pleading for some form of peace. The first sound you hear on Viet Cong could very well be the end of the world. The booming thuds of “Newspaper Spoons” are a gripping decimation march, and that’s before Matt Flegel’s blaring howls enter. The record’s first words could double as a bird’s eye view of the album as a whole: “Writhing violence/ Essentially without distortion.” When Munro and Christiansen’s guitars enter, they exist less as lead and rhythm, and more like bloodthirsty animals fighting one another, snaking and stabbing around each other in dissonant tones. The track is like an unflinching snapshot of unspeakable horrors, even if the horrors themselves are never explicitly named. This is where one of Viet Cong’s greatest graces in aging comes. While it’s not impossible to make good post-punk that’s undeniably specific about contemporary affairs, Viet Cong’s refusal to offer easy reference points creates a striking contextual negative space to its lyrics, one that plays a huge role in the endurance of its sentiments. The names and faces of those wreaking violence may change, but the root causes still remain the same. Sample a handful of stray lyrics on Viet Cong and they could just as urgently embody the kind of polemic that’s only intensified in the decade since the record’s release. “What side are you on, man?” Flegel exclaims at the height of “Bunker Buster,” caustically exposing the shallowness of this antagonistic rhetoric, before lobbing another provocative jab of xenophobia at the unseen target: “I know eventually you’ll tell me where you came from.” On “Death,” Flegel laments going “too far the other way,” insinuating an ideological disorientation that strands him amid “[everything] turning inside out.” In an interview around the release of their debut EP Cassette, Flegel described his songwriting as singing about “the ridiculousness of being,” and that’s often what the lyricism on Viet Cong sounds like: tilting the hostility of the modern sociopolitical world to such extremes that it exposes the ridiculousness underneath, without undercutting the very tangible threats that hostility represents. There’s none of that ridiculousness to be found, however, whenever Preoccupations lock themselves into a groove for several measures on end. In the hypnotic, pummeling instrumental passages of “March Of Progress” and “Death,” Preoccupations stumble onto a different kind of poignance, capturing the tangible uncertainty that comes with living at the whims of a global death machine. In revisiting Viet Cong over the years, these spans have taken on the effect of reflecting pools, blank slates for me to project onto whatever unresolved geopolitical tensions plague my mind. In 2015, when the record first came out, it was the unknowability of the political landscape ahead, the inability to see what was coming just over that year’s horizon. In 2020, it became an arresting fear of pandemic, of how much unfamiliar disease would ravage the human race. When I revisit Viet Cong now and spend over two full minutes losing myself in the looping drum barrage of “March of Progress,” or the doomy crashes in the middle of “Death,” I still find myself anxious. I know how many measures lay ahead of me in the song, but the feeling envelops me in such totality that it may as well last forever. I’ve sensed the emotion it makes me feel my entire adult life. I may as well be feeling it the rest of my lifetime. But “March Of Progress” also carries a different kind of repetition: In its final minutes, the melody takes a sudden turn. A low hum lumbers in, engulfing the shimmering melancholy that came before. Then the guitars and drums rush forth, their energy almost… bright? Amid all the despair and gloom, here’s a passage that breaks through, almost achingly luminous. And, here, Flegel hangs onto a single refrain longer than anywhere else: “Tell me, tell me, tell it to me, tell it straight/ What is the difference between love and hate?” So much of post-punk is an attempt to make sense of the social disorder that surrounds the music, or — at the very least — offer pointed criticism about it. On “March of Progress,” Preoccupations take an alternate approach: practically pleading for an explanation as to why human beings ignore their instincts toward goodwill in the first place. They seek an understanding as to what it can possibly take to correct the course of increasing violence and animosity we’ve been on for millennia. If there’s any progress that Preoccupations want to steer their music toward, it’s that. Beyond all this conceptual stuff is a simpler observation about Viet Cong: It still slams. There’s such a force and punch to the record that still keeps it feeling immediate, not least because it flows with a ruthless urgency. You need the foreboding atmosphere of “Newspaper Spoons” and the compact despondency of “Pointless Experience” to set the tone, so that the turn “March Of Progress” takes feels like clouds parting just when they seem at their darkest. You need “Bunker Buster” to anchor the sound of the whole thing, taking a skeleton of a riff that could have been transported straight from 1979 and morphing it into so many alternate shapes that it feels wholly present-day. And then you need “Continental Shelf” and “Silhouettes” as the pieces that bring an immediate jolt to Side B and drive the record home. “Continental Shelf,” in particular, has the kind of melody that feels almost evergreen, like something that’s been part of post-punk’s subconscious songwriting lexicon for years before being committed to record. I love the way its first verse takes great patience to build, its instrumental emphasis shifting as its heft grows and grows — Wallace’s snare hits sounding like firing squad shots, Flegel’s voice rising into raucous screams. It grips you so thoroughly that the chorus mellowing out feels not like an anticlimax, but rather a weary reflection of everything before. And then the riff explodes again. Meanwhile, “Silhouettes” is the record’s one unapologetic ripper. So much of Viet Cong works in forlorn, mid-tempo anguish that hearing the first notes to “Silhouettes” in context is akin to a jump scare, rushing out the gate and never slowing down. With its disco beat and plunking piano, it’s the purest thrill on the album, as harrowing as the fragility of mortality can be. (“Maybe too late will be much too soon” and “anyone can disappear in a spark” are both lines in that song’s bridge.) And then comes the complete opposite: “Death” is the kind of gargantuan album closer that fully merits that bold a title. If it wasn’t already clear from the above lines on “Silhouettes,” Reimer’s untimely death casts a large shadow over Viet Cong, a current that comes to a head here. At 11 minutes long, “Death” is the grand synthesis of everything Preoccupations bring to the table, rising and falling through barren jangle hell, an apocalyptic march, a crashing post-rock purgatory, and, finally, a final push so frantic and harried that it brings everything crashing down. “Death” is a cataclysm opera in miniature, a punishing exercise in an “accelerated fall,” as Flegel puts it lyrically — whether in reference to a single life or the human race entirely. It’s also, for my money, Preoccupations’ single greatest achievement. It’s a track where the band pushes their chemistry and bodies to the very limits. Every time the whole thing suddenly collapses at the very end, I find myself breathless, yet immediately wanting to throw myself back into the fray.

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