Some music is timeless because it captures a mood or emotion so perfectly that it breaks through to the fundamental elements of human experience. The music made by Vancouver, Canada’s Winning is timeless in a more mundane, and arguably gimmicky, way – they play music with no time signature.
It’s an intriguing experiment, no doubt born from an extreme aversion to the overly time-conscious music of the math-rock genre. What’s surprising is how much this timeless, unmoored music sounds a lot like math-rock in the end. Sure, it’s not as tight or aggressively precise, but if you took a math-rock song, chopped it up and stretched it out a bit, it might come close to what Winning is doing on their album.
They fit well with their labelmates Death From Above 1979 or Hella. They have lots of punchy, dissonant chords, and incessant drumming, and they certainly get a C for concept on This is an Ad for Cigarettes.
The free-form improvisation that should feel liberating and lead them into new horizons of musical creativity seems to linger in the same sonic rut throughout. Each song is the same collection of jittery, spastic bleats of noise. That’s fine, but seems it to undermine the purported boundary-pushing aspect of their concept. They’re probably a blast live, though.
– Michael Patrick Brady
Winning (Ache Records)