you are reading this because you are smart. you are good. you are erudite. you have great taste. and for those reasons, i don’t need to tell you about Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. i have no idea if New Haven-based rock band Fleurs gets their name from that book of poetry, but their similar tones invite the speculation. that’s right, i’m about to get real pretentious, so get out while you still can.
Les Fleurs du Mal is fun because it’s grotesque. but more than that, it is stunningly great, which makes it impossible to look away from its savage look at humanity, its nasty vignettes, its vulgar sensibilities. fair critics couldn’t just shrug it off as smut because it was brilliant, high-culture smut. and that same sense of dirtiness is something i get when i hear Fleurs’ music. their first album, Life of the Appetite, is a gothic-punk by way of rough Americana. not only is its production dark and brooding, but its subject matter (runaway capitalism, drifters, violence, and body parts — never a full body, but only its tactile pieces) are peak Baudelaire.
so if you missed it last week, Fleurs released “Sophomores”, the first new track since last year’s Life of the Appetite. there is no currently-announced album or EP on the horizon, but it is easy to imagine this track serving as its opening gambit. it works itself up, with distant and fuzzy guitars, into a dirty lather, reaching its key hook nearly two minutes in. it’s a provocative song. a nasty ballad about sex, or maybe a ballad about nasty sex? no judgment of course, but when the narrator mentions that he’s never met “a human like you / a human like you”, rather than “girl” or “man” or “woman”, it is easy to see past this individual’s own humanity.
okay, and i also wanted to tell you about The Brazen Youth, too. their new song, “Contemplation, Twilight” is too good. leading up to the soon-to-be-released EP, 15 Billion Eyes, this track along with first single “I Don’t Wanna Take Too Much” offer an image of a daring, inventive record by the young band. based out of Lyme, CT, i don’t see them play much with the typical New Haven or Hartford venues, making them all the more mysterious and unknowable (to this writer).
where 2018’s Primitive Initiative worked through layers of fresh indie folk, “Contemplation, Twilight” is an impressionistic take on their own sound. half The Brazen Youth you know and love, and half A Moon Shaped Pool, the song becomes something else entirely from which it began. it’s beautiful, haunting, and absolutely lovely. give it a listen (below), and find yourself in a state of bliss when you realize that the EP will be out in just a few days (9/19).
