Arrangements - Preoccupations: Review
Preoccupations
are a Canadian post-punk band who rose from the ashes of Women as Viet Cong before changing their name to Preoccupations and evolving their dark and rumbling post-punk sentimentalities throughout.
Review by Lav:
Not every review I publish will start with a direct personal connection to the band despite the past two weeks where I confessed to having an embarrassing Teen Suicide phase in high school and being hopelessly attracted to The Garden. My relationship with Preoccupations is simpler, they're a great band and I love their music. I liked Women, I liked Viet Cong even more when various members of Women reformed as a new band and I liked Preoccupations when they debuted the name change in 2016. If there's one project in their catalog that I'm less than high on it's their previous album, 2018's New Materials and that isn't an unpopular opinion. So four years removed I was excited to see where the band went next and I honestly think that Arrangements is a return that lives up to their name.
The lead single to this album Ricochet came with a lot of hype for me and once I digested the fact that the band was back I realized I wasn't crazy about the song. That changed when I heard it in the context of the whole album which is much more playful than anything they've ever done before. I thought there was a silly almost nostalgic quality to the vocals at points that turned me off at first but they actually fit in here better than I thought they would.
While I'm doing some light complaining Recalibrate is the one song on the record that I just flat-out don't like. There are plenty of other songs on the record with slow builds on the verses which I can totally tolerate as long as they're building to worthwhile conclusions but that isn't the case here. It has moments that I enjoy here and there but ultimately once the hook falls short the song really doesn't do much for me.
The other single Death Of Melody connected with me right away and does the slow verse erupting into a great hook trick perfectly. I love the cascading sirens that transition the song into the hook not to mention the refrains that are incredibly catchy. The results are an absolute breeze of a song that hits me in the moment and sticks with me afterward. I feel similarly about the intro track Fix Bayonets which is an incredibly exciting start to the record with a rush of wonderful shoegazey guitars and an excellent introduction of the new look vocals which are delivered in a much more exciting fashion than you might expect from Preoccupations.
Slowly and Advisor come back to back and fade right into each other in a really exciting way that serves up 12 minutes of greatness right in the middle of the record. Slowly comes right out of the gate with a rousing instrumental that I love, but in hard contrast, it does something else that I normally don't love. Ambient outros to non-ambient songs are certainly a played-out and often unnecessary cliché but Preoccupations have always done them well and this is another great example of that. Advisor follows on from that outro and takes it's time getting started given that it has a full 7 minutes to work with. I like the first half of the song but it's nothing compared to the second half. After a slick transition around the mid-point it becomes a very familiar style of brooding post-punk from their early days and I'm eating it up.
Finally, there's closing track Tearing Up The Grass which I wouldn't say is a favorite of mine but it really does the job of expressing a sense of finality for the record. The slowly building instrumental palette and group vocal harmonies make everything feel so larger than life for Arrangements' final moments.
Even though it's been four years since we last heard from them and their previous album wasn't a fan favorite, it really shouldn't be that surprising that Preoccupations returned with good new music. The fundamentals are clearly intact and their decision to transition into a livelier, more playful style of music paid off big time on this record. In a year where so many great rock albums have tried to dial it up to do the absolute most, Arrangements proves that more slight adjustments can still go a long way. 7.5/10
This cover is really cool and makes you look at it for a minute before you realize what's going on. It makes you take it in and look around, maybe even zooming in to find the faces and silhouettes which will draw more eyes. The black and white color palette works to make it even more striking. I think the top right or left could have an emblem or logo but otherwise, it's really well done. 8.5/10
For more post-punk check out my review of Viagra Boys Cave World here
