Public Strain is the second album from the short-lived, but hugely important Canadian rock band, Women. A dark and alluring album of addictive and weaving neurosis.

Women only lasted a couple of years before they flew too close to the sun and entirely self-destructed. Although the quartet were volatile, they did manage to fit a lot into their two year existence between 2008 and 2010 before fighting on stage led to an indefinite hiatus. Sadder still, in 2012 the band’s guitarist Christopher Reimer died in his sleep bringing the project to an end. The remaining members all kept working - Matthew Flegel and Michael Wallace formed Viet Cong, later renamed Preoccupations, and Pat Flegel formed Cindy Lee - but Public Strain was the final and defining statement from Women and it captured quite extraordinary songs and performances. This is proper ‘lightning in a bottle’ stuff.

The foreboding opener, Can’t See You is onomatopoeia, a murky soundscape that matches album’s evocative sleeve art with blurred characters battered by a blizzard. From the thick fog, Women then move to another dynamic with frenetic and jangling off-kilter guitar lines and baying vocals. Heat Distraction just grabs you and there is no letting up. Chad VanGaalen’s production is inspiring. Sonically the album is so unique, a raw and abrasive sound that wraps around the stereo like a circling storm, with waves and waves of distortion and weird reverbs. The album moves through different paces, dynamically they also shift between sparse, degenerated pop songs and much fuller sections with skewed and paranoid riffs. The album’s closing track - Eyesore - then has everything; odd time signatures, both intimacy and vastness at the same time, and extended jams that wind into knots. It finally locks into a Krautrock drive with the melancholy slowly burning into euphoria before just all fading away to nothing. The eerie magic disappears into the hiss.

It’s all so beautifully unsettling, it is an album that truly howls at the moon.