When Calgarian siblings Patrick and Matt Flegel dissolved their beloved indie-rock band Women in 2012, they effectively mined its components like a couple divvying up their assets after a divorce. Patrick imported Women’s uncanny sense of melody into the phantasmagoric pop project Cindy Lee; Matt and fellow Women exile Mike Wallace repurposed the group’s foundation of dissonance and drone for their new band, which would come to be known as Preoccupations. A decade on from their caustic and confrontational early recordings, Preoccupations have evolved in much the same fashion as their post-punk forebears did at the dawn of the 1980s, when the nascent MTV airwaves were filled with former DIY denizens angling for their close-ups. Preoccupations’ fifth album reaffirms what ’80s kids raised on the Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunnymen, and a steady diet of made-for-TV nuclear-disaster movies internalized long ago: Post-punk is pop music, perhaps the only kind that makes sense in a world inching toward apocalypse.
Ill at ease is hardly a thematic stretch for a band whose catalog already includes “Anxiety,” “Pointless Experience,” and “Death.” But this time, Preoccupations express mental anguish and world-weary fatalism with more graceful gestures and, at times, genuine jubilation. The first sound we hear on the album is a frantic door-knocking that feels both ominous and exuberant, and the song that follows, ”Focus,” continues to skate that fine line: While the gate-crashing rhythm matches the distressed, psychoanalytical tenor of Flegel’s lyrics, the mood is brightened considerably by a buoyant chorus hook and a B-52’s-style female backing vocal that lifts the song to ecstatic heights that Flegel’s sandpapery voice wouldn’t reach on its own.
As Flegel’s words turn bleaker, the album’s mood turns brighter. “I think we’re ready for the asteroid,” he sings over sanguine motorik synth-pop of “Bastards.” “Andromeda” has him wishing the Earth would hasten its inevitable collision with the titular galaxy, yet it’s an iridescent rocker that suggests Interpol blazing down a Southern California freeway, capped by a soothing synth line from Scott Munro that beams like the sun over the horizon. The ever-present tension between Ill at ease’s grim lyrics and grand designs isn’t being milked for irony; it foregrounds a sense of humanity and romance in a world that threatens to turn our hearts to stone. “I can’t believe the apocalypse is taking so long,” Flegel seethes during the strobe-lit, Depeche Mode-esque chorus of “Sken,” before making a poignant pledge: “You’re the only thing that’s keeping me calm.” By Preoccupations’ cynical standards, that practically counts as a love song.
