Customer Reviews

Magic Flowers Droned

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When I entered the band's name in the Amazon search, this CD and Times New Viking's "Rip It Off" both appeared. The band's name gives their attitude away: there's no lysergic awakening here, no terrors of the mushroom. There's a lot of similarities with TNV, however. Both bands love Swell Maps and early Pavement, and there's a hint of The Fall and lo-fi indie bands from the post-punk and garage eras too. The recording's so raw that, as my fifteen-year-old son commented, it sounded like a twelve-year-old in the basement with a tape recorder.

Now, this sort of delivery's hard enough to do when you're Steve Malkmus or Scott Kannberg laying down slay tracks in the spirit of Mark E. Smith or Epic Soundtracks during the rise of Gen X not the band but the mid-80s slacker. Today, it's even more difficult to invest deliberately amateur approaches in an era of ProTools and digital processing that even the twelve-year-old in the basement can afford. The retroactive nod to the tape recorder's a harder move to master in our non-analog, non-cassette age. We're far removed from Tandy-level gear of the late 70s as a necessity rather than a deliberate choice for even struggling musicians in today's digitized and affordable arsenals.

The band, suitably, is signed to Siltbreeze, who issued lots of defiantly discordant experimental material in those desparate times of the past. They fit the label's anti-aesthetic, but the band seems in it more for the fun of it than to make a Serious Art Manifesto like even Magik Markers might be tempted to do under the aegis of Sonic Youth, to name a contemporary band with another set of raggedy but calculated no-wave art-rock aspirations.

It's amusing, but there's less lyrical depth than would lure you to listen again to Pavement's "Westing (by Musket & Sextant)" compilation of their early home efforts, or an old Fall or Swell Maps or Xpressway (New Zealand's counter-reaction to Flying Nun's heavenly pop hits) release from the glory years of what used to be pre-SXSW college or fringe or alternative and little-heard recalcitrant outsider rock. I did perk up at their incorporation of a keyboard riff stolen from The Clean, speaking of that pioneering NZ group's earnest coupling of punk with Krautrock with abrasion with melody: "Portals." Also, the singer's addition of Mark E. Smith's trademarked 'uhs' after each word on "New Wave Hippies" brought a chuckle from this Fall fan.

So, the group gets my support for continuing what's now a thirty-year-old trend of anti-studio sheen by feckless youth, even though it's uncertain how far such a well-travelled side road's going to take them. My prediction: like their influences, they may well find themselves with more instruments, more ambition, and more of a polished studio sound soon enough if their enthusiasm outlasts their sarcasm. It's happened many times before in the past three decades.