Flowers of Hell – O

Nothing wrong with ambition, but it can be a dangerous thing. Flowers Of Hell describe themselves as a “trans-Atlantic space rock orchestra” and on last year’s album Come Hell Or High Water pretty much fulfilled such a highfalutin brief. Leader Greg Jarvis has over the years employed members of Broken Social Scene, the Patti Smith Group, Spiritualized, Spacemen 3, British Sea Power, the Earlies and Guided By Voices, funnelled towards a sonically expansive suite of orchestral post-rock with a leaning towards shoegaze, like Ladies And Gentlemen…-era Spiritualized reinterpreting Stravinsky with purpose.

Even by those standards, though, O is a challenge. An album that consists of one 45 minute track tends to be such. (The physical version also contains a DVD featuring a 5.1 surround sound mix and an hour long concert film based on Come Hell Or High Water, but we don’t have that to review) Throw in that, recorded in one take by Fucked Up producer Jon Drew, it’s intended as an audio representation of Jarvis’ sounds-as-shapes synaesthesia and is based on the principles of ‘absolute’ music in which nothing therein is about any specific stories or images but just exists, and you begin to wonder if this might be a successful attempt at formulating an album inoculated against the pop format.

It’s not that we haven’t all heard free-form mood music instrumental post-rock before, though. From the slow, droning churn with which the piece opens, augmented with subtle flurries of muted piano and shivery, reverberating strings, you can tell this is a band who’ve soundtracked NASA footage, moving at glacial pace across alien landscapes. It may feel like a steady drone, but layers of varying sounds – distant horns, cymbal washes, dislocated pedal board effects – fade in and out, shaping and mutating the central monolith of low frequency noise.

As for the extensive arrangement, it takes its time but eventually occasionally lives up to the heft of its ambitions and is sometimes quite affecting. The passage of four minutes that starts about 16 minutes in – regretfully, you have to write like this – where horn flourishes are pitched firstly against a lone violin, then to Tortoise-like restrained gradual surges, is like British Sea Power’s Man Of Aran soundtrack transposed to Mars. However it eventually gets subsumed into the atmospherics and takes some time for another period of action, to upset the steady loll of the floating, virtually mournful central piece.

That arrives with in particular a thunderous cascade of cymbal rolls and subsonics around the 26 minute mark, eventually bringing in a typhoon of swelling, storm-tossed strings and panning dreamscape/nightmare noise, picking out little counter-melodies on violins and woodwind in the midst of the maelstrom that all the carefully crafted build-up apart. After five minutes or so it finds its inner peace in lushness. Apart from a stirring but brief string quartet piece, it allows itself to fade away in its own time much as it had been doing, but with greater audible optimism and less of the anchoring drone, leading up to a solo violin spiralling upwards to the heavens to close as the shoegazey noise returns underneath. If nothing else it’s mixed beautifully throughout, allowing every entering instrument or prominent passage to stand out in recognisable crystal clarity against the shimmer.

The ultimate trouble is, apart from about ten to twelve minutes of languidly frenzied activity it doesn’t really add up to much. There’s clearly great talent at work and Jarvis is someone skilled at both corralling musicians into following his vision and arranging an extended piece featuring little actual repetition and great moments of surge and restraint, but it’s not something you’d want to put on again and again, too wound up in its surges for 3am listening or background music, too long in getting somewhere to qualify as essential post-rock. Fearlessly fascinating, nonetheless, and Jarvis and co’s next move should be worth keeping a close eye on.