PREOCCUPATIONS - New Material

From the corrosive name Viet Cong to the more generic Preoccupations, the transition was a painful one; less traumatic, however, was the evolution from the corrosive, granite-hard post-punk sound of the original line-up to the less furious, less restless sound of the current moniker.

And it's precisely in the darker atmospheres of the debut under the Preoccupations name that "New Material" sinks its claws, a project that still plays with the melancholy transfigurations of Joy Division, while dipping a foot into the lyrical ocean of Cure, New Order and even Gary Numan.

The basic idea remains the same: to achieve a disturbing, or at least not entirely conciliatory, sound, letting the minimal post-punk harmonic structures flow in the manner of Killing Joke or Berlin-era Bowie.

The result is dystonic: the emotional tension is often caught between an intriguing ideological framework and a set of songs that suffer from lyrical vertigo, rarely capturing the essence of the postmodernism so proudly flaunted on the splendid cover art.

Once again, the sequence of titles corresponds to specific moods or contexts, but the album rarely captures the intensity of the moods it evokes. "Espionage" immediately lays bare the conceptual dissection that defines the new course of Preoccupations: all the mystery and magic of the music remains anchored to the dark, atonal sounds of post-punk epic.

No track on “New Material” possesses the hallucinatory beauty of “Memory” or the brilliant rhythmic progression of “Degraded”; the urgency of their early days has by now been outflanked on the left by sounds that are either glossy or forcibly obtuse, which at best evoke Chameleons (“Antidote”), while often lingering in sonic layers reminiscent of the less incisive pages of Interpol  (“Disarray”) or even Talking Heads-meets-Television suggestions (“Decompose”).

In trying to make their music more harmonious, Preoccupations lose a bit of depth and originality; the narrative of existential struggles tied to depression and anxiety has ultimately become a more rigorous ideological model (“Manipulation”), muting the original 80s-style new wave fury that once so vividly captured a sense of generational despair and isolation.

“New Material” isn't a bad record — indeed Matt Flegel's voice is pleasantly stripped-back, though never truly cathartic, and often rather murky; the musical elements are as skillfully interlocked as ever, yet lack an equally rich aesthetic.

The only genuine moment of “worry” comes packed into the four minutes and thirty-nine seconds of “Doubt”, too brief to conceal the creative fraying of a band increasingly more concerned with aesthetics than substance (“Compliance”).

In attempting to depict modern personal and social dystopias, Preoccupations ultimately fall victim to the creative oblivion bred by self-satisfaction.

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31/03/2018