Saturday, October 4, 2014

The Blueflowers - At The Edge Of Disaster

The Blueflowers 



The Blueflowers always aim for the heart.

Not to warm it, no, but to break it.



The guitars cast a canopy of nightsky haze with their cool-grimace riffs reverberating endlessly into a night that’s already haunted by the beautiful wail of our balladeer, Kate Hinote, sounding as supernatural and sumptuous as if she just came to life from an faded oil painting of maroon and jade, belting a quavering coo that could rattle the drafty, candle-lit mansion inside which the Blueflowers music seems to inhabit… Oh, the cinematic strikes of those tastefully theatrical percussive elements, from slow waltzes to dashing shakers, snappy handclaps and rustling floor-toms, oh, the woozy heartbeat of that strutting bass, the pinched metallic howl of the pedal steel soaring over it, the comforting throwback surf-jangle to those riffy guitars…

“I sit on a table with my sunglasses on / I’m waiting to fight you, but hope that you win…” There’s an album opener for you, richened with reverb coated guitars and a bassline that slithers low to the floor like a viper ready to strike, a slow sashaying beat starts and it evokes a weary, wiry stride across a cleared out jukejoint with one’s fist clenched, ready to wring out all the romance in the room with all the right words for all the wrong reasons… The magic of The Blueflowers, these masters of the dark-and-dreamy aesthetic and the shuffling Western fable of loves-gone-wrong, is their ability to make the quaintly playful aspects of pop/rock, like handclaps, and the rustic charms of Americana…sound almost ominous, if not, yes, cinematic…like Nick Cave wrote a screenplay for Quentin Tarantino to direct while using whoever’s does cinematography for David Fincher…


This record’s out on October 24th

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