5 out of 5

Label: Polyvinyl

Producer: Graeme Gibson (Engineer)

I guess I’m, like, not a proper JOA fan for liking this album so much?  I wasn’t again Joan of Arc for a long time, brushing them off as an emo supergroup, the overly whiny vocals not doing much to convince me of anything.  I reveled in the backlash that The Gap caused.  But then one of my favorite labels – Perishable – put out a JOA album and a side project, Friend / Enemy, featuring some regular Perishable players and producers.  What was a shock was the, dammit, I liked it, and I even started to understand where the vocals fit into the mix.  Oddly, though, the Perishable album – “In Rape Fantasy and Terror…” – was sort of an outtakes album, featuring tracks which were eschewed from their main release at the time, “So Much Staying Alive…”  Same goes for “Flowers,” apparently, which was recorded at the same time as “Boo! Human” (just going based on allmusic here) and so is assumed to be the cutting floor clutter, assembled into an album.  So why is this one of the most comprehensive JOA albums I’ve heard?

After getting used to their sound, and their flowy dynamic, I’ve been able to go back to old Joan of Arc and dig it, and I wish I owned their whole massive catalogue.  But all of their albums have some element of filler to them, or stupidity in the lyrics, which I guess comes with being partially improvised all the time (or, uh, seemingly partially improvised?).  “Flowers” is the first release I can dig from start to finish, as though, in getting rid of a lot of the tracks that they didn’t feel quite “defined” anything, Joan of Arc ended up collected a sequence of tracks which hit on some pretty straight forward musical concepts.  It’s still absolutely JOA, but calmed down at the right spots and amped up at the right spots.  I like the general flow, also, with only a few tracks being vocals.  It gives everything a sort of seamless feel, one track haunting in to the next, and yet the grooves are distinct enough that you can pick out individual songs.

Whatevs.  I LIKED IT.