Review: Flowers Must Die ‘Tystnad’
It’s been a while. Life has conspired to do what it does best, i.e. laugh at man’s plans before putting them in a blender and coming up with its own baffling concoction.
As such, it has been great to once more climb aboard The Shaman’s sonic wagon and get my teeth into this glorious slice of Scandinavian psychedelia.
According to the accompanying press release, the literal translation of Tystnad is silence, referring not to the auditory experience contained within the album; rather, it’s the name of the studio in which Flowers Must Die created their latest offering.
As is the nature of these things, the promo dropped into my inbox as I was just finishing a trip of my own – geographical rather than lysergic, you understand – one of just over six hours. Flagging and desperately in need of some physical head cleansing, I lay on my bed and tentively pressed play. Serendipitously, this turned out to be a great idea. It seems that a hypnagogic state can be a fine way to appreciate psychedelic riffing, tootling, wailing and chanting.
Track one, Vet Ej, launches us straight into five minutes of proto-Hawkwindian riffage, overlaid with guitar and flute noodling. It put me in mind of some of that archvillain and all-round Charlotte Anne, Julian Cope’s more muscular jams – think By The Light Of The Silbury Moon and you’re in the right vicinity. It’s the rhythm section that really underpins the whole piece – and a lot of this album – staying right on that incessant, trance-inducing 4/4 with very little deviation. It’s a full-on initiation, setting the listener up for the rest of the album.
Raka Vägen För Damo (which I’m assuming refers to the one-time Can frontman) begins with some military-esque drumming before beginning to wind up into a trance-inducing sonic whirling dervish, which builds and builds, threatening to spit the listener out before gently coming back down to a halt. Personally, I could’ve done with this one being at least twice as long, oh yes please.
the layers and instruments are added one after the other, like ingredients in some infernal galactic sonic brew…
Elsewhere, Nåja gives the listener more of a groove to drop in to, along with some squally Nic Turner-style sax work. It also introduces some mobhanded vocals – very krautrock. This track has some of the heaviest kosmische vibes that made me want to dig out those old Faust and Amon Düül II albums for a bit of a sesh. Just the one query, though: did they not know how to end this tune? It just kind of petered out into saxophone tootling, hmmm.
For those reaching for a reference point, there are parts of the album that connect the dots to some of GNOD’s less, shall we say, intense and noisy work, their more introspective pieces on Easy To Build, Hard To Destroy. Flowers Must Die are a shade or two (or three, or four) more psychedelic and definitely waaay further out into the kosmos.
The seven tunes on Tystnad are all incredibly dense pieces of music. Whilst the motorik rhythm is kept simple throughout, from the inception of each piece, the percussion and bass lock in for the duration; the rest of the instrumentation, including voice, is layered, sometimes to the point of a divine suffocation. On more than one occasion, my brain was grasping for what it was I could hear, skipping from one line to another, trying to separate out the instrument and melody. Where the layers and instruments are added one after the other, like ingredients in some infernal galactic sonic brew, the resulting groove is hallucinatory and immense.
I’m usually a guitars/bass/drums man with little time for tinklers and tooters, but the range of auditory tools used to wonderful effect here is impressive. On the title track, Tystnad, I’m pretty sure my lugholes managed to pick out strings, clarinet, flute, with oodles of the aforementioned sax, none of it out of place or jarring.
Critics of this kind of music might say that it’s directionless, just a jam, an improvised journey to nowhere, but that would be to miss the point entirely. Tystnad is Flowers Must Die driving a bus, having thrown the satnav out of the window. Maybe they don’t know where they’ll end up, but for the listener who signed up for the trip and climbed on board, that’s the attraction.
Label: Rocket Recordings
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: George Green
