Reviews Updated 01/01/2005 Album review Anthony Carew original article link Echoing with so much space and distance that the reverbations thereof bounce back about three decades, Women & Children make out-of-time music that's misty and mystical, wistful and whimsical, drawing their spirit from the celestial bodies of the VU family-tree; from lysergic hazes reminiscent of the 'out' times of the Velvet Underground, to the amusical mantras of the Dream Syndicate, to the sombre lamentations of Nico. Vocalist June Serwa has her Nico-ness down, too; her voice all mournful murmurings pushed down into a deep register; she casting such out from behind piano, organ, or percussion in a fashion that most befits the out-of-time threads that so often cling to Women & Children as they strut through mood-music minus most of the platitudes of postmodernist soundtrackists, with the combo's unironic communal communing seeming to cast them as flower-child throwbacks in a miscast modern age. I mean, at their most baroque, they occasionally settle in audio territories nearly reminiscent of the ad-hoc fantasias assembled by Areski in his work with Brigitte Fontaine; though this reminiscence has more to do with those notions of spirit than it does to do with the specifics of musical arrangements and hot record-collections and such. On their debut disc, the Paris-born quartet --consisting of two Americans, a Canadian, and a Frenchman-- oscillate b'tween moments of flowery post-hippiness and cloistered guitar-droning-ness; their devout Nico-ism often falling off into freefloating moments whose spun-out spinnings turn the kind of crystalline circumvolutions that modernist drone sweethearts like Windy & Carl arc across glacial horizons. To call it 'beautiful' seems reductionist, for me; this disc weaving a more complex web than merely laying out musical modes of established prettiness. Information : http://www.attacknine.com/ or http://www.darla.com/