#002: Preoccupations - Focus

The diagnosis is I'm doing my best
To forget everything that I know

I distinctly remember the distinctly unsearchable band Women, a strange and beguiling musical prospect who graced us for just five short years between 2007 and 2012. From their name to their music, everything about Women seemed very deliberately intended to keep the audience at arms length. Sharp melodies rendered through a sharper, icy, lo-fi production, indie pop with the cloaking device of art rock arrangements, distant vocals beamed from the analogue radio in the next room. A messy, myth making split, followed by the untimely death of guitarist Christopher Reimer, added to the mystique. The moth is dead, but comfortable in its display case.

The story doesn't end there. The bloodstream of Women flows into the indie scene of the 2010s, and demonstrates how their potency of latent pop ambitions should not be understated. Producer Chad VanGaalen is a prolific and acclaimed independent artist, while vocalist Patrick Flegel became Cindy Lee, the most leftfield pop act to ever be nominated for two Polaris prizes. That leads us to bassist and drummer Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace, who reconvened to make a more direct take on the post punk sound of Women, as Viet Cong. Everyone makes mistakes.

A wise rename later, and Preoccupations are born, preoccupied as they are by the sounds and atmosphere of a particular strain of music from the 1980s, propulsive, dramatic, retro futurism. On Focus, I hear the good parts of Ultravox, Flock of Seagulls, and their own stated influence, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. It's a predictable, knowable song, but one that sounds immediately timeless, as if you've already lived through the era it came from, danced with it, with friends, or alone. When Flegel delivers the line "The diagnosis is I'm doing my best / To forget everything that I know", I see the visuals to the film that this soundtracks. Someone is running, from someone, something, a time, or a place. We don't know what, or why, but they are running from their past, hard and fast.