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Jan 20, 2015Viet Cong were a group full of promise on their debut EP, Cassette, and with their harder, heavier, and more powerful debut album, they're making it clear they have the talent and smarts to become a major force in Canada's indie community.
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Jan 14, 2015The result is something that sounds mechanical and generally detached from emotion.
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Jan 23, 2015For now, it is refreshing to hear a band mining the searing sounds of ’81 as a cold breeze that kind of shakes you awake rather than making you want to run back indoors right away to cower under your own fears.
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Jan 15, 20152014 saw many bands trying to recreate sounds of the past in their own way, but with Viet Cong, the band are remoulding genre conventions and confirming that they’re not settling for anything other than pushing the boundaries.
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Jan 16, 2015Viet Cong's volatile brew often coalesces into something disarmingly catchy.
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Jan 20, 2015It's these frenzied, sharp-turn transitions are what make this band feel so vital, so alive and so different.
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Jan 20, 2015With music sounding this raw, vibrant and strikingly different to the current generation yet achingly familiar to those that will remember the original post-punk era, Viet Cong have tapped into something exciting, something too big to be contained in a Canadian city most famous for winter sports, and something that could just be the tip of the iceberg for yet another intriguing Canadian act.
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Jan 20, 2015Fans of Women’s challenging melodies will appreciate the songcraft here, but Viet Cong are very much their own animal; with deep forays into demonic white noise ('Continental Shelf'), clanging post-punk ('Silhouettes') and psychedelic/prog-rock on sprawling closer 'Death', they're expanding into adventurous new directions.
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Jan 20, 2015There’s a brittle vulnerability present in Viet Cong that triggers an innate sense of curiosity and optimism despite the downtrodden tone it adopts.
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Jan 14, 2015The songcraft is high, balancing repetitive groove with dynamic surprises. There's so much variety here, from icy Joy Divisionesque excursions (Silhouettes) to Guided by Voices-through-an-echo-chamber mood (Continental Shelf) to melodic hooks (Bunker Buster) to howling post-punk fury (Death). It lends huge excitement to the project.
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Jan 22, 2015Viet Cong has only seven tracks and more than half don’t pass the five minute mark. Yet all are heavy, ingenious contraptions.
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Jan 21, 2015It’s appropriately chaotic, tortured, and labyrinthine; and yet still, after listening to it over and over, I can’t help but feel that it’s those delicate, beautiful moments scattered throughout the album that stand out the most among the discord, as few and far between as they might be.
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Jan 20, 2015Their approach works because the songs are so excellently written than they’d be praiseworthy coming from a less capable, more pedestrian group
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Jan 20, 2015The thought and vision tucked into these constructions are inexhaustibly fun to listen to and unpack.
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Jan 14, 2015By having more passion, more energy, more imagination than most of the field combined. By making an album that's weird and wild and I suspect unlike anything else that'll be released this year.
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Jan 29, 2015An ambitious and rewarding debut.
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Jan 21, 2015The best albums allow us to ruminate on life’s big questions, giving insight not only into the mind of the artist but reflecting the sentiments of the beholder, and Viet Cong does exactly that.
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Jan 16, 2015The heartening, splendid news is that this first album, a self-titled, seven-track whirlwind, is full-on brilliant all the way through.
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Jan 23, 2015Despite some questionable, off-putting decisions, there’s a wistful, melancholic temperature to this eponymous debut, one belied by the band’s sophomoric war metaphors and rubbery noodling, and it makes their self-titled debut one of the most essential records of the season for me.
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UncutJan 14, 2015They've developed a needling, post-punk style that nods to Joy Division, Gang Of Four and Shellac. [Feb 2015, p.84]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 67 out of 73
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Mixed: 4 out of 73
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Negative: 2 out of 73
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Jan 20, 2015
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Feb 24, 2015
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Jan 22, 2015