Joan of Arc

Flowers

(Polyvinyl)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

I have a long history with the music of Joan Of Arc. Sometimes loving it, sometimes, well, getting annoyed by it. It had actually been awhile since I last sat down and listened to the music this band was making. Actually, I don’t think I had given the band a serious listen since The Gap came out in 2000. It has been awhile. So, time to check it out again. The one thing that has remained the same in all these years of Joan Of Arcing is Tim Kinsella, and here he has gathered another fine group of musicians and instrumentalists to help him paint this most current picture.

We’ve got the regular musical conspirators like Sam Zurick and Mike Kinsella, plus members of Town and Country (Josh Abrams and Ben Vida), Wilco (Leroy Bach), and Emmett Kelly, who often plays alongside the bonnie prince Will Oldham.

Put all of this together, and you’ve got a strangely cohesive fragmented beautiful album full of snapshot instrumentals and post rock pop songs.

The disc starts out with “Fogbow”, which flows like some minimalistic meditation tape, vocals falling poetically and spoken soft about halfway through the song. If this is post rock, it’s way post rock. This has gone almost post post. If the Beat Generation got into New Wave it might have ended up sounding a little like this. Avant-what?

The next song moves into a little more of a slight classical piano drift, but still keeping up with that sparse flow of sound.

“Flowers”, the longest song on the album at 6:38 (the shortest clocking in at around 1:24), hits with a little of that spastic broken jazzy blue that makes me feel like going back and listening to some Cap’n Jazz. There are little hints of elements that make me thing of Firehose, or maybe even the minutemen, and I don’t really remember thinking things like that while listening to previous Joan of Arc Albums, but maybe… and than scattered with little shotgun scraps of noise and melodic dissonance.

Most of the album moves up and down, in and out, along those same lines, focusing mostly on instrumentals and creating moods and atmospheres and even complete songs out of the use and experimentation with sound and how you can move it through space and, I think, as far as this band goes, time. There are a couple of vocal tied tracks, like the slight rock-straggle riff of “Life Sentence / Twisted Ladder” which seems to be torn between Guided By Voices and Yo La Tengo and a slight hit of the Owls.

Then there’s “Explain Yourself”, which is a hip-hooping groove beat covered by a slight keyboard riff, and that touching heartfelt indie-rock rap that Kinsella has managed to perfect. This is Joan of Arc, the perfect blend of poetics, noise, obscurity, melodies, rhythm, and sensitivity. All wrapped up and twisted around until you can’t quite figure out what anything really means, but you can’t stop listening either.