When Westender reaches Preoccupations member Scott "Monty" Munro on the phone, the guitarist/keyboardist and his bandmates are enjoying a relaxing day off at a cabin in the tiny village of Edgewater in the East Kootenays.
“We’re staying with [drummer] Mike [Wallace]’s step-dad. Drinking some coffee, chilling out. It breaks up the drive nicely. We’ll maybe go to the hot springs later today,” Munro says gratefully. “It’s fucking scenic. It’s right in the mountains.”
This relaxing getaway stands in stark contrast to the past year and a half of Munro’s life, which was marked by controversy and tumult.
Preoccupations originally earned widespread acclaim as Viet Cong, but the members – Munro and Wallace, plus singer/bassist Matt Flegel and guitarist Daniel Christiansen – faced a swift backlash due to their name. Critics accused the ensemble of cultural insensitivity, pointing out that the Viet Cong was a military group with a history of bloody atrocities. Promoters cancelled shows and the musicians faced protests before finally changing their name to Preoccupations in April of this year.
“It was pretty stressful a few times,” Munro says, adding that he paid little mind to the social media furor that surrounded the band. “All I know is that I had a bunch of conversations with people that actually fled the Vietnam War. Grandma-aged people that were protesting our shows that had actually fled the Viet Cong. We didn’t change the band name for PC culture. It was for those people that were directly affected by it, and I personally feel good about that decision to change our band name.”
He goes on to acknowledge that, when he and his collaborators originally decided to call themselves Viet Cong, they didn’t fully consider the political implications of the name.
“We didn’t realize how it affected people that had actually fled that war and we didn’t have a proper understanding of all the sides of it when we named the band that,” he says. “I’m happy that it turned out the way that it did, and I’m happy that we went through the conversations to learn what people had actually gone through at the hands of the Viet Cong.”
With the name-change controversy behind them, the four friends are pressing ahead with their first album under their new moniker. The self-titled Preoccupations channels the distortion-laced post-punk doom of the outfit’s prior work as Viet Cong, but this time with tuneful hooks and sweetly spacious synths.
Opener “Anxiety” sets a bleak tone with sinister vocals and a peculiarly off-kilter time signature, but the mood changes with the entrance of a twinkling keyboard riff. Closer “Fever” similarly relies on a tension between harsh tones and gorgeous synth textures, while the 11-minute epic “Memory” moves from uneasy art-rock to a cathartic dance groove (with guest vocals from Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner) and culminates in several minutes of sublime ambience.
These multifaceted songs were pieced together from years’ worth of disparate recording sessions. Some of the tracks date back to early demos, recorded soon after the breakup of Flegel and Wallace’s former project, Women. Other parts were recorded with returning producer Graham Walsh, and still other parts were cut in Montreal’s Breakglass Studios.
“It’s nice to be able to mix the different fidelities and sessions together,” Munro says, describing the recording style as “socialist” in the way that the members shared multi-instrumental duties in order to contribute to all parts of a song.
The results are simultaneously experimental and accessible, making Preoccupations an addictive listen.
“In our minds, I think we all wanted to make a pop record,” Munro explains. “I know it didn’t necessarily turn out as a pop record, but that’s what we were shooting for. To try to make a record that was a full pop.”
It’s a new direction for the musicians, who have moved on since the upheaval of the past couple of years. Munro points out that adopting a new name gave the band a chance to make a clean break from its past style. Then again, adventurous artistry is something that has always been written into the group’s DNA, regardless of what it’s called.
“[Changing our name] gave us the freedom to do whatever we wanted, but we were going to do whatever we wanted anyway,” Munro asserts. “It’s not like we felt like we needed to make another scrappy punk record. We all would have been disappointed in ourselves if we made the same record again, regardless of what the band name was.”
• Preoccupations perform at the Rickshaw Theatre on Sept. 28 at 9pm. Tickets $20. Their debut album is available Sept. 16 via Flemish Eye.
