Customer Reviews

Flowers of Romance

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4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
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I think it is important to know the circumstances that surrounded this album. First, Jah Wobble, their incredible bassist was no longer in the line-up. Second, was that in the UK this "tribal" thing was happening in the underground. It was very short lived, but spawned albums by Killing Joke, Adam and the Ants, Bow Wow Wow, and some others. Think what you want about the commercial dreck that came from the later two, but they were very popular with the influential British music press at the time. PIL stated that 'losing' Jah Wobble was not going to ruin the band. And furthermore, they could outdo everyone else being influence by this "tribal" thing with only one drummer, and without a bass player. With one hand tied behind their back, in a way. They were thumbing their collective noses (especially Lydon, of course) at the musical establishment - much like the Pistols did, but in a totally different manner.

What turned out was 'Flowers of Romance' -- the most un-pop, un-rock album ever to be considered to be placed within these categories. Drums pound, sometimes in tribal 4/4 time, sometimes in their own time signature, sometimes with no time signature that can be discerned. Vocals wail (to say the least), are clearly audible but much of the time lyrically incomprehensible. Instruments that sound like forty-foot sitars or tablas played by insane asylum inmates, and vocals by a man who does not have all his faculties in order. Yet one senses that perhaps he knows more than we do. It is a fantastic album. One must keep an open mind, though. It is not like their first album. It is not like 'Metal Box'(aka 'Second Edition'). It is most likely not like anything you've heard before. They seem to be inventing their own musical vocabulary. Many might think PIL are being influenced by World Music, but for the life of me I can't figure out which 'world' they are talking about.

One of my favorite PIL albums. One of the strangest, most marvelous albums of all time.

This is not a CD for anyone who despises minimalism and dissonance. Pounding drums and Lydon's moans are the primary instruments on this album, and the latter is definitely not for everyone. Track 8 is a hypnotic look at lust, Four Enclosed Walls takes an Islamic perspective of the West, and Under The House is the only song I've ever heard that actually gives me the extreme chills (it seems to deal with a person who has seen a cadaver come out from underneath a house. Lydon's vocal delivery is that of a person whose mind has just been wiped out by such an inconceivable sight and the moans in the background are just disturbing). Francis Massacre is angry and frantic, as is the title track. All in all, this album creates a mood of tension and unfathomable darkness that Lydon has never explored since. Get this and Second Edition and you can boast having two of the most horrific yet beautiful albums ever made in your collection.

These songs are like nightmares committed to tape. Very odd, but I quite like it. One of the strangest albums ever released by a major label. Every bit as good and as influential as Metal Box, although it sounds nothing like it.

That headline there should also say "by a major record co.", but I didn't have room. But anyway, as much as "Metal Box" is praised - and for all the right reasons (it is one of the all-time greats) - my fave PiL album has always been their third studio effort, the truly apocalyptic "Flowers of Romance". This would have to rate as A) one of the most criminally discarded and unwanted albums in music history (the number of secondhand copies I've seen...) and B) one of the most stupidly ignored records by people who'll actually ENJOY it. In other words, all you avant-rock geeks with a hankering for the likes of Faust, Captain Beefheart, Funkadelic, King Tubby, Amon Duul, '70s-period Miles Davis, Can, Sun City Girls and other big names in the field have been ignoring this disc for WAY too long.

"Flowers of Romance" is the perfect synthesis of such sounds: the disjointed rhythms of Beefheart, the uber-funk of Funkadelic, the Eastern drones of Can and Sun City Girls, the heavy dub of 'Tubby, the cut-ups of Faust, the free jazz of Ornette, the percussionist vibe of Amon Duul and the nihilistic clutter of prime Miles. Every man and his dog namedrops these people, but few achieve such results.

"Flowers of Romance" is brilliant both within its context and within its own right. As far as avant-garde, risk-taking rock music you can actually dance to, it's just about the peak; as a statement from Lydon & co. to push the boundaries further whilst all his contemporaries played it safe, it speaks volumes. Unfortunately Lydon never did truly push boundaries again after this effort, but if you invest in the first 3 PiL studio albums and get your ears around them, you'll be a better person for it.

One of my faves of all time.. intense percussion, sparse backing music, Lydon's amazing (middle-easternish) vox. Will clear the room even faster than Metal Box. Still sounds innovative today. I had a friend who liked R.E.M., Jeff Buckley, etc. and was convinced our tastes were similar, so I lent her this to clear up that little misunderstanding.

First time I heard this album, I was ready to toss it out the window or use it as an ashtray. I put it away - then pulled it out again several months later when I took a third shift job... the punchline is I love this thing!

I can imagine dark streets, flying carpets and industrial wretchedness. Perfect! It sounds like third world music being played on conventional rock instruments. Lots of sprawling, tribal-like drums coupled with J. Lydon's screeching, odd voice - all other sounds fill the gap between the two. Lydon's voice seems more at home on this album more than anything else he has done. "Flowers of Romance" is an aggressive antithesis to popular music of that time. Not surprising. I especially love the track entitled PHENAGEN - beautiful, almost religious chanting.

I wonder if PIL will ever get their due? Maybe one those instances, much like the Stooges or VU before them, when twenty years later someone decides this is actually great music? I'm glad I found out sooner than later...

Was anyone else here besides me at that New York club show, lo those many years ago, when PIL came out behind a screen and started playing "The Flowers of Romance" and a riot with flying bottles, ash trays and what have you broke out. The mob tore the screen down and roadies raced out to protect Johnny and company and got them out with their lives and glass shattered everywhere in the mayhem until the coppers arrived. I was under my table as a protective measure, but, lord almighty, I done saw it all that night. John Lydon just loved to mess with the image of rock star and rile up the populace. Great theater, even if it was real. We never did get to hear the end of the first song. Another one in the memorable loss column.

This is not the polished work of genius that 1979's "Metal Box" was, but the 1981 masterpiece "The Flowers of Romance" was the essence of early PiL ripped open and exposed for the world to see: articulate, poisonously sarcastic loathing of everything that the world had to offer. Drumming predominates on this LP, but so do terrifying electronics and, surprisingly, Middle Eastern touches. The cause of all this choas was actually one very simple reason: defining bassist Jah Wobble's departure, who is sorely missed, but who wasn't actually needed for this percussion-and-samples record, made immediately after he left.

1 Four Enclosed Walls - An ominous ticking and buzzing starts the record, followed by drumming that sounds like Godzilla stomping on Tokyo. Lydon's piercing wail is used more as an instrument than a vocal, and backwards tapes of Keith Levene's piano, Middle-Eastern string music (actually Lydon playing an odd, violin-like instrument), and an odd, electronic meowing noise (actually Lydon playing soprano saxophone) complete the picture.
2 Track 8 - Badly looped sledgehammer drumming, clean guitar fed through electronics and looping, a metallic, clean lead guitar, and buzzing bass hits are the musical backdrop for a monotonous, cruel, quietly sarcastic Lydon vocal spinning a narrative about turkeys and elephant boneyards, but centering on an encounter with a very ugly prostitute.
3 Phenagen - Tribal drumming and percussion set the stage for an off-kilter piano line and fuzzy electronics. Seems to be about religion. The backwards tapes at the end are absolutely terrifying.
4 The Flowers of Romance - This, astonishingly, was a U.K. Top Twenty hit, making it one of the more freakish singles ever released. The single mix, the true classic, is the one to get, but the album version isn't bad. Because of this, though, I would recommend burning this CD instead of buying it (Lydon already has enough money). Cello, avant-garde violin, and tribal rhythms duel it out under Lydon's classic vocal.
5 Under The House - A surefire way to piss off your neighbors, give your pet snail nightmares, and make your baby destroy priceless antiques with an aluminum baseball bat, Under The House is one of the PiL classics. The band bashes out drum rhythms that would have made John Bonham jealous, while random backwards tapes of opera on TV, synth, and guitar feedback play around and around the mulberry bush. Lydon's processed vocal is almost sleepy, telling a story of a zombie moving into the basement.
6 Hymie's Him - A percussion instrumental only broken by occasional string synth chords. It's cool, but Lydon should have given it a vocal.
7 Banging The Door - Horrifying, whizzing, choking electronics (Trent Reznor, eat your heart out), a dire, droning bass line, and crushing drums hammer away as Lydon rants at everyone who ever knew him and would ever try to contact him, his paranoia at full boil. I like this track possibly the most.
8 Go Back - Spindly, bizarre keyboards and robotic, stiff funk drums stomp out some new territory, and Levene's razor-wire, largely atonal guitar scraping finally makes an appearance. Lydon satirizes extreme right-wing politics beautifully here, declaiming in time to the lurching drum rhythm.
9 Francis Massacre - All hell breaks loose. Heavy machine-gun volleys of drumming resound with atonal piano and Lydon howls about going to prison for life. The album ends with the sound of the studio burning down.

Another track, "Home Is Where The Heart Is", is great, but it isn't on the album. That track is dominated by bass (one of those signature early-PiL dub lines that warm as much as they chill), but the bass was played by Levene. Atkins funks out inside an echo chamber, Levene's guitar and synthesizer are relegated strictly to the background, and Lydon uses the vocal timbre that he used on "Memories" to denounce suburbia, like he did earlier on "No Birds". This song, and this album, are PiL's final statements of importance.

Even now, some twenty eight years after it's release, trying to do justice to "The Flowers Of Romance" in words is an exercise in futility.

That is to say that numerous words can be used to describe it - funereal, pummeling, bleak, abstract, hypnotic, industrial, unnerving, angular, jagged, brutal - but none of them can really do justice to it as a listening experience. In terms of content, it can only be described as music in the loosest possible terms and that it must certainly qualify as one of the most uncommercial albums ever released by a major record label. To say that it polarizes opinion amongst audiences is an understatement akin to that of describing the sinking of the Titanic as "a minor boating accident" - Lydon and co. were allegedly bottled off of the stage numerous times whilst touring its release by fans bemoaning the loss of Jah Wobble and clinging to the more conventionally musical wreckage of the spectacular disaster that was the Sex Pistols, and, to this day, it would be fair to say that the majority of the population at large would, if forced to sit through a playing of the album in it's entirety, label it as "unlistenable crap".

Its not though. Its abstract, its uncompromising, its ambiguous and whilst its true that it's creation probably was driven by a lacking knowledge of musical composition more than anything else, in it's own uniquely nihilistic and typically Lydonian way it's musical naivete turns out to be its greatest asset.

Driven by Keith Levene's apocalyptic drumming, Lydon's tortured semi-ironic caterwauling and an omnipresent bed of droning synths, electronic effects, detuned basses and badly played guitars, `FOR' opens up a uniquely personal vista of hellish experience. It not only walks where angels fear to tread, it pauses there to light a cigarette and gaze lazily in through dirty tenement windows at the eldritch horrors and Munchian figures that dwell within. In places it sounds like a `pestmasse' for a dying mediaeval city ("Phenagen"), the scariest horror film soundtrack ever written ("Under The House" and "Hymie's Him" - the latter of which was originally written for the film, Wolfen), a human soul succumbing to the seductive necessities of bleak indifference and futile optimism ("Banging The Door", "Go Back" and the title track) and the biggest joke that you've ever heard ("St Francis Massacre" - I generally skip this one and end the album with "Go Back")

Few soundscapes have ever attained the nightmarishly compulsive disquiet of this album. The only two that I can think of that have ever come close are Skinny Puppy's Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse and David Lynch's Eraserhead (Original Soundtrack)

I'm not going to suggest that you buy before you try - with an album as uncompromisingly uncommercial as this, to do so could invariably lead to dissatisfaction, but I will suggest that you give it a listen to see if you can relate to the singular tone and timbre of this dark diamond in the rough.

The product details say this cd has bonus tracks. That is a false and misleading mistake! Unless it says *import* there are NO BONUS TRACKS! Its just the album in its original sequence and nothing more. Shell out the extra bucks for the import and get the 3 bonus tracks: Another (Graveyard+vocals), Home Is Where The Heart Is, and the Flowers of Romance instrumental.