Where lo-fi and stoner rock meet head-on, Dutch duo Flowers' debut album emerges like a solid breakthrough, a work which shrewdly draws from the best of a bit of an overdone genre to breathe fresh air into it, yet sounding almost unparalleled to anything else we've heard in 2019. Doom City is a concept album with a look and feel of a progressive rock record like how they used to make them in the seventies, but its heavy rock directness is straight up rock 'n' roll.
The album is built around the idea of "a decaying, industrial, deserted, isolated place in an empty, resourceless desert," and the superlative grit of its sound, as well as the duo's poignant delivery, convey those post apocalyptic images and notions to the full.
"The city is a metaphor for unsustainable systems/situations that would be better to let go of – let it be destroyed to make place for something better," the band share in a statement. "For Flowers this unsustainable system is the binary gender system – it’s struggling to survive, it has to perish to make place for a new and better way."
From the Kyuss-infused heaviness of Flat Tired Chuck which turned our heads the band's way back in June, to the slow-burning ten-minute dirge of Chemical Burn which now comes with a beautiful, naturalistic visual, Flowers' narration of a dystopian, compelling and bleak story goes through both clear-cut hard rock and exploratory noise rock ways. Doom City is deprived of dull moments, and the more piercingly loud and fuzzy it gets, the more it lures the listener into its creator unique and full fledged vision.
Flowers are Roos Pollmann and Judith van Oostrum. Doom City was recorded and mixed by Rasmus Bredvig at Tapetown Studios, and mastered by Emil Thomsen, and its the follow up to their self-titled EP from 2017.
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Cover artwork by Nick Sullo
Photos by Dennis Duinhouwer
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