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The term "slow burn" was made for Uneasy Flowers, the second offering from New Zealand-based supergroup Autistic Daughters. Following the rickety post-rock of 2004's Jealousy and Diamond, the band returned with a newfound sense of purpose and conjured a viciously imagined aural landscape that's all the more haunting for its sparseness. Set in perpetual nighttime in what could be a depressed version of Middle America, we get a seriously fragmented quasi-story of a man named Rehana, who wanders through the record in a half-asleep, half-drunk, possibly psychotic state. Scattershot images flash before our eyes, as in a dream that isn't quite a nightmare but still feels wrong, and human instinct forces us to make connections between disparate parts; is the kid who chooses gin over sour milk the same Rehana Jr. who hears the President caution him with strange adages? Naturally, the music is a reflection of the protagonist's world, with shuddering guitars, Spartan pianos, fractured drums, frayed radio transmissions, and the deer-in-the-headlights singing of vocalist Dean Roberts. The densely layered closer, "Hotel Exeter Dining Room", turns the record's convoluted anxiety into flat-out dread: as the guitars and the voices ascend higher and higher they become no less pessimistic, bracing themselves for the train at the end of the tunnel. The musicians have captured Rehana's inner turmoil so masterfully that we are not merely voyeurs; we are invisible presences walking alongside him, experiencing the world as he does. Relentlessly introverted, quietly terrifying and endlessly fascinating, Uneasy Flowers takes the notion of what a successful album in 2008 should sound like and burns it, slowly, through and through.
