I haven't been able to write anything better than this on Public Strain:
"Post-indie rock indie rock is copies of copies of collages of copies; in the hands of Women, however, it’s not that cut ‘n dry. They work the degradation of the process, blow-up the resulting scuzz to canvas their gallery walls, splay melodies into abstractions into new melodies as they zoom in more and more. These aren’t Brooklyn hipsters dancing, it’s their dancing pixels. The subversion of staid indie rock becomes the subversion of a hundred different things, a hundred different roles, and Public Strain envelops all that, highlights all the contrasts and contradictions that are built into indie rock’s origins but have been lost over time through the genre’s maturation into a broad and often dull establishment, into Death Cab and shirt dresses and well-made music calledThe Suburbs. With gumption Public Strain breaks through the static of a moving yet flat image in order to bare the quaking microcosmos beneath. Its tracklist is a unified yet eclectic collection; “Bells” is dark ambient and “China Steps” is motorik with Sonic Youth guitars and “Venice Lockjaw” is aching balladry and “Eyesore” is perfection fucking chaos on top the whole indie canon and much of the rest is, at once, Nuggets (1972) and not Nuggets. Women have no use for indie rock as a market, a lifestyle, or even as a genre—it is merely the substance they break apart and unfurl into a letting of noise, of unseemly chords, of momentary transcendence, of their own identity." more
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