Released on 20 January 2015, "Viet Cong" is the debut studio album by Canadian rock band Viet Cong. Is the only album released by the band under this name, as they changed their name to Preoccupations in 2016.The album spawned three singles "Continental Shelf", "Bunker Buster" & "Silhouettes".
In 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. they sought to sketch out untapped darkness for a new generation of post-punk.
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. 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 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. "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.” 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.
And then you have "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.
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