Pitchfork

Calgary's Women, like Columbus' Times New Viking, give tape hiss a place of honor more often reserved for instruments, or at least computers. It's the first sound you hear on "Black Rice", from the group's self-titled debut LP. The crackling analog fuzz quickly recedes, however, behind handclaps, primitive drumming, glockenspiel-like chimes, and a reverby, deadpan male vocal-- the stuff of the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" comedowns. As a plonky, little more than two-note guitar riff gives way to chugging power chords, the chorus melody climbs Shins-like chutes and ladders up to a falsetto Lou Reed wasn't given to attempting. "I swear an ocean swallows me/ But all I really want is just another girl," the frontman insists. The ensuing noisy jangle straddles the 1960s' divide between the Warhol crowd's speed-addled New York cynicism and the echoes of psychedelic San Francisco that bubbled up across the pond in the fey, catchy pop of UK groups like the Zombies. Women's labelmate and Sub Popper Chad VanGaalen gets the blame/credit for the appealingly lo-fi recording.