| Cokemachineglow |
 I have enough affection for Joan of Arc to be picky. It’s not like I think all of their albums are indiscriminately great—I’ve listened to Guitar Duets (2005) exactly once—but there is something about their dryly funny, detached aesthetic that reminds me of classic Godard. Well, at least in its ability to transmit wise, warm, adventurous truths in the context of an unrefined talent by basically just fucking around with the confusing blob of tragedy and philosophy at the bottom of everything. A lot of fucking around.
Flowers, released less than a year after their last record, has lots of focus on guitar chops, with Kinsella smoothly creating his own math-rock Fahey hybrid and then impersonating it. Apparently the songs were “improvised in the studio,” but the only difference qualitatively is that there are less lyrics and pop structure than the more song-oriented Boo! Human (2008). The idea that Flowers is all kinds of tossed-off makes the occasional melodic references to last year’s album seem more lazy than self-reflective, but with little ambition to cut new ground, the band’s by-all-accounts laid-back and communal approach simply works. The record is split between acoustic guitar-with-samples maundering and vaguely Krautrock full-banders, and both are pretty engaging. This looseness pitches it more as an ambient, woozy album than Boo! and Everything, All At Once (2006), their last few intense, lyrically-beefed relationship meat-grinders. Less angry and political than Joan Of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain… (2004), it also shares a jammy breadth with that album—the id to the super-ego of the band’s more, let’s say, semantically complex albums....full text |
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| Spin |
| These Chicago indie vets have caught flak over the years for being too arty and inscrutable, so maybe that's the reason songwriter Tim Kinsella spends part of his tenth album justifying the impulse to even create art. "Why still must be the heaviest soft syllable," he wails at one point; in other words, Kinsella explains, this shit is hard to explain. And yet, Flowers, a collection of mystical-seeming noise collages, absurdist dirges, and Pavement soundalikes, is as listenable as it is difficult to pin down: Hearing Kinsella empty out his mind might just calm yours....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| For Flowers, Tim Kinsella is backed with the same cast of musicians who guested on last year's outing, and, considering that the recording dates coincide perfectly with the ones listed on Boo! Human, it would be a fair assumption that these are the tracks that didn't quite make the cut last time around. Littered with improvisational instrumentals ("A Delicious Herbal Laxative," "Flowers," and "Fasting") and near-instrumentals with only background monosyllabillic sighs for vocals ("Table of the Laments," "Fable of the Laments," and "The Sun Rose"), only five of the album's tracks are actual songs with lyrics. Disappointing as this may be, rest assured, the fully realized moments are pretty solid. "Fogbow" finds Kinsella tinkering with an indie electronic digi-beat, in a new-fangled, peppy Hot Chip pop style, and "Life Sentence/Twisted Ladder" time travels back to his Chicago post-rock roots for a choppy, guitar-driven number. In a more traditional Joan of Arc manner, the reflective, piano-based "The Garden of Cartoon Explanations" and slinky open-tuned acoustic-based "Tsunshine" are unnerving ballads that are one part pretty/two parts creepy, with ominous, ethereal keyboard splashes darkening the air. After a handful of sampled artists count off "1, 2, 3, 4" at the end of the aforementioned song, the album shifts into a warm instrumental groove that wouldn't sound out of place on a Tortoise album before transcending into the record's highlight: a cathartic space rock ballad titled "Explain Yourselves #1." Here, vocals vibrate with tremolo effects and create a mood that's downright tranquil. The rest is hit or miss. Joan of Arc's work on a whole generally tends to be pretty loose, but sorting through the remnants and mood pieces on Flowers can make Boo! Human seem absolutely cohesive in comparison. Oh well. It's still totally listenable and likeable. Even if it's a little underdeveloped, fans of Kinsella's trademark observational musings won't want to live without gems like "Who put the quotes around your life" and "No one wants to die with a couple hundred bucks still stuck in the sock drawer."...full text |
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