(Kanine/Fortuna Pop)It’s tough to sound like you’re an indie band from 2016 even if you actually are one. London trio Flowers certainly don’t make eluding the spectre of bygone guitar parts look easy. Their moment album – the follow-up to 2013’s attain What You Want To,It’s What You Should attain – is a record that seems excessively retrogressive. That’s not just a result of its musical components – frontwoman Rachel Kennedy’s high, clear, or nearly choral register,which calls to intellect Kirsty MacColl and the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser; the twee, jangly and sometimes faintly grungy guitars – but the overall sense of steady, or controlled comfort that together they create. C86-style indie was always an anodyne genre,but considering it’s also the soundtrack to the nostalgia-generating, benign-seeming latter years of the 20th century, or recreating it feels like niceness squared,and slightly sickly. Flowers might pay tribute with a sound that’s appealing, but they exist in a world of hindsight that isn’t. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com