I can almost smell my old acne coming back. Flowers make the kind of music that would have soundtracked many an evening for me in my late teens, more than likely while I was forlornly lying spreadeagled on my bed, listening to a 4AD compilation, feeling sorry for myself and wondering why nice girls hated me.
Memories of Throwing Muses and Belly come flooding back, but it’s equally easy, at times, to level comparisons with the jangly pop of The Primitives or The Darling Buds. Occasionally, it even bears similarities with seventies New Wavers like Deaf School or X-Ray Spex, but it’s the dirty thrust and crunch of the guitars that aligns Flowers, most obviously, with the period 1988-1993.
It’s a far cry from the band’s rather more twee 2014 debut, Do What You Want To, It’s What You Should Do, and is all the better for it. If there IS one problem with it though, it is that sometimes, the wall of sound engulfs frontwoman Rachel Kennedy so drastically that it’s nigh on impossible to work out what on earth she’s singing about. Granted, this is a time honoured tradition in the dusty annals of rock ‘n’ roll history, and it never did My Bloody Valentine (whose very own Brian O’Shaugnessy is behind the control desk here) any harm, did it? But something is nagging at my brain throughout, telling me that Rachel has something to say and it’s worth hearing.
It probably doesn’t matter all that much though, if I’m honest. I’ve just listed a whole array of acts that could be held up as the blueprint, to which you could feasibly throw Young Marble Giants into the mix too, but the truth is that Flowers, while it is clear that they have imbibed a multitude of influences, somehow end up not really sounding THAT much like ANY of them.
Everybody’s Dying To Meet You bravely begins with the fantastic ‘Pull My Arm‘, not unreasonably lauded as their career pinnacle so far, but instead of a gradual downward trajectory after such an explosive introduction, the band keeps itself on a pretty even keel thereafter. Never does it deviate too much from its chosen path, but at the same time it walks a different walk on each departure. The record fair flies by, on account of the brevity of most of the songs here, but I suspect that this may have been a ploy to ensure that the bewitching ‘Intrusive Thoughts‘ has the right level of impact when it comes.
It’s not perfect by any means, but EDTMY packs enough a punch for us to wonder, with intrigue, where album three is going to lead us.
Everybody’s Dying To Meet You is released on 12th February 2016 through FortunaPOP!
