Viet Cong
Viet Cong
(Jagjaguwar, 2015)
A
Hobbled, bruised, and neural passages fried into a stickily charred web, Viet Cong is hurting, inside and out. The Calgary rockers’ full-length debut is collected out of that leaky amygdala, its contents — chemically unstable, emotionally raging — melting anything it touches. Not head nor heart, Viet Cong is archetypal survival music born from anguish: A livelihood dissolved in a fistfight (Women) and sudden passing of an ex-bandmate and dear friend. That embattled core of vocalist Matt Flegel and drummer Michael Wallace found a pair of lethal guitar marksmen in Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen, bandaged and propped up enough by those additions to sublimate unbearable pain into an engrossingly savage listen. It’s a record very much about humanity, terrified of the destruction it breeds, the band having snapped a femur for not jumping out of its way. And Viet Cong needs to warn you about that if it’s the last thing it does.
Confessional, these dirges are. The seven tracks lay think upon each other like manic diary entries taped up across every square inch of an apartment basement’s walls. The titles themselves (“Pointless Experience,” “March of Progress”) read like the beginning of a suicide note, a soul-sinking picture as empathetic as it is dark and daunting. And it eats you up from your toes to your chest, a latched and burrowed leech whose pressed tension rattles the cellar door and sounds the alarms. But for the feral brutalism spliced into its DNA, the troop is willing to offer a hand and drag you to safety with hooks and recesses aplenty. The frayed noise of them gnashing a hurried scrimshaw of marrow-deep truths is met with post-punk appendages poking through the cracks of that boarded up window, a form that fetishizes infection as much as confrontation.
Like the four-piece’s debut EP, Cassette, most of the color (soothing synth tones, afro-punk-channeled percussion and chord build-outs) is wiped away into a soapy brown film. There are pops of blue and red throughout, though, a cynic who can’t crush the last ounces of lingering optimism he holds on to for fear of the monster that he’d otherwise become. Women could make the festival-friendly jangle rock tamed just enough to be chased down by a shot of Vitamin Water, but they delighted in building up a tower of acute riffs and plucky choruses only to kick out a few support walls. Viet Cong similarly flirts with off-kilter breakout moments in “Continental Shelf” and “Silhouettes.” The respective uphill battle cry and slung arrow melee are a bloodying set piece designed to leave anyone in shouting distance torn to shreds, swiftly shifting from distantly throbbing rock anthem to grenade pin-pulled new wave detonation.
Cathartic is a term thrown around often, but this isn’t an arena-rock ploy for cheap shivers, a Starbucks cup of iced goosebumps; this is an earned, hard-fought, long-sought acceptance of past, present and future, its members self-actualizing as individuals as Viet Cong does so as a group. The exhausted finisher, fittingly coined “Death,” is the last gasp of a band that has left every collective milliliter or its being onto a record. It trudges to what feels like a close in its eighth minute until it implodes into the most manic and unchained species we ever witness, only stopping because it can’t move forward anymore. Or maybe it just didn’t need to, its questions answered, glory achieved, victory torn from life’s cruel clutches.
