Insistently pushing its way out of the speakers with an urgency that will subtly produce a lurching beat before we know what’s even happening, “Fall Into Life” begins to play. There is both hesitation and recklessness here, but neither are strong enough to overtake the sense of discipline created by the structure of the rhythm in this song. Unlike the scattered but whole “Ny-Lon,” “Fall Into Life” is meant to highlight the sonic Jekyll and Hyde that lurks in the background of Waxflight’s best moments in their new record Flowers, and it absolutely sets the perfect tone for what follows if I do say so myself. If mood is everything to the millennial listener, this is an LP certain to make a huge splash this year.
“Daughters of Progress” is oddly heavy for how simplistic and relatively smooth its compositional design is, but its contradictions don’t stop it from sounding like a hit – truthfully, they’re what make this track one of the harder tunes to put down in Flowers. “Kissing a Stranger” is a lot more controlled and focused around an old school alternative pop stylization (think Depeche Mode and The The, only with a decidedly greater love for yearning hooks), and when paired with “Chemicals” the two songs are absolutely the best identity pieces you’re going to hear on this record. If Waxflight are telling us a story across these ten songs, it’s definitely a personal one; if it weren’t, I don’t know that any of this material would sound as searing as it does.
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Turning up the string prowess for “Myth of You” and the freeing neo-shoegaze of “Sancte Michael,” Waxflight start to really sound like an alternative powerhouse as we get into the second half of Flowers. “New Dogs” takes the conceptualism of “Ny-Lon” and launches it into another universe of possibilities only slightly experimented with in this album while “Equation” feels like a Bubblegum-era Mark Lanegan number too retro for the singer/songwriter to record. What makes them a perfect combo is the continuity created by the passion of their creators, who pummel us with more emotion in these two tracks than many will anticipate discovering here. It’s amazing content, and definitely something I would come back to this band for in future releases.
Flowers comes to a heavenly conclusion with the divine “This Street,” an over seven-minute long performance that firmly plants Waxflight’s interests in the psychedelic camp over any other in the pop spectrum at the moment. When it’s all over and the music has ceased to play entirely, it’s easy to turn around and cherry-pick the preceding nine songs just for some additional context and clarity now that we’ve heard the LP in its entirety. There’s a lot to unpack here, and for being an album that was recorded during a pandemic, it’s ironically one of the cleanest and most carefully produced works I’ve heard from a purely indie act in quite some time. Flowers is a mystery and a mightily irresistible way of getting to know Waxflight, and in either case I recommend listening to it before the start of spring.
John McCall