Pitchfork

Women and Children make strange music-- it's ostensibly folk at its heart, drawing from both 1960s Greenwich Village and Celtic traditions, but it also traverses well-trod ground laid by the Velvet Underground and the Beatles. It manages to do all of it within an unstable and unpredictable production environment that values reverb above all else and sometimes goes too far to affect a ramshackle, amateur feel. This is the band's second album and first as a duo, and it's well-sequenced to lead you smoothly from one facet of their sound to another, opening with what in many ways is the most uncharacteristic track and closing with the one that best sums everything up.

Listening to nothing but opener "Born TP" would be like reading the first chapter of a novel-- it only gives you a tiny slice of the story. That's one of just a few tracks with drums, for one thing, and the only on which percussion drives the song. The song also supports an insistent guitar figure and Kevin Lasting's deadpan tenor and is crowded with background noises-- muffled shouts and singing that don't really add anything other than clutter. The next three songs aren't a total departure, but they feel different, sparser, and more enigmatic. "Your Honour" is built on two acoustic guitar chords but edged with charred electric guitar, and "Feed a Fire"-- the first song built around Cheryl Serwa's vocals-- begins simply, gets sidetracked in a crowded, rhythmic section, and ends in a beautiful medieval haze of female harmony that sets the stage for the rest of the album.

That is until "Rolly Fingers" (presumably a reference to the Hall of Fame closer, though it misspells his first name) closes the record with the most fully realized union of the band's tendencies, the album is mostly an offbeat folk record in the vein of Fresh Maggots or Comus at their most tame. The reverb is still huge, and the occasional schizoid tendency, such as the woman who calls to Lasting's vocal on the verses of "Ugly" still pops up, but it's mostly built on finger-picking, strumming, and stingingly cold piano piano parts.

There are a few astounding moments where the texture of a song will rip open and roughly scraped violin comes pouring out. On "Polly Ann", it's a longing Celtic phrase come to offset the McCartneyesque sweetness of the chorus melody, and on "Virginia Creepers" it goes further, spinning a bit of sawing on the cello into a crazed string arrangement. Serwa takes "Sweet Spirit" a cappella, her voice lonely in the reverb, but she really shines on "Oranges", a baroque, piano-driven song whose sound improves as it goes, and she adds additional vocal parts, harmonizing with herself in twisting counterpoint that snaps in and out of unison for a disorienting effect.