The L.A. band Exploding Flowers have been earning comparions to The Soft Boys, but the reality is that the group's sound owes a debt or two to just about everything good you listened to in the Eighties. Saying that is to imply that jangling guitar-rock is better than synth-pop, of course. And Exploding Flowers, out with Stumbling Blocks via TheBeautifulMusic, are here to remind you just exactly how much energy can still be found in this form. Call it power-pop of a sort too, but everything on this record is aces.
"A Daunting Thought" manages a nice mid-tempo vibe, while "Stumbling Blocks" chimes like early R.E.M. and The Plimsouls. Elsewhere, "Far, But Never Gone" has a early Britpop thing happening, while "Billions Just Like You Here Today", with its organ-based hook, reveals a Sixties debt owed by these players. "Timing is Everything" is catchy and bright, even as "Imagine the Possibilities" sounds like both C86 stuff and Paisley Underground numbers simultaneously. This is more excellence from Exploding Flowers, and nothing here isn't wonderfully appealing. Still, closer "Are We So Disposable?" with guest vocals from Suki Ewers adds a melancholic mood to things here, a rolling Brian Wilson-like momentum underpinning this one.
Stumbling Blocks by Exploding Flowers is out this week via TheBeautifulMusic.
More details on Exploding Flowers via the band's Facebook page.
[Photo: Exploding Flowers Facebook]