Album: Flowers of Romance
Artist: Public Image Ltd. (P.i.L.)
Year: 1981
Genre: Post-Punk/Experimental
Label: Virgin
This album is sick, and I don’t mean awesome or feverish sick. I mean Junk Sick. This album is heroin addiction distilled into music. Listening to it brings waves of misery so cold and inhuman that you want to crawl into bed and hide from it. But you can’t. This sickness follows you, it clings to you like a parasite, and there is no escape from it. You must wait it out to be cleansed of it. The wait isn’t long, only a little more than a half an hour, but it’s a dark half an hour. The black void is filled with pounding drums and dark wails detailing pains and atrocities the likes of which would drive a man insane if it were anything but fiction. Before this, P.i.L. was a band, a strange band, but a definite band, with a singer, guitar, drums & bass. The bass and guitar are all but completely gone and the reaming instruments are bleak and foreboding. The voice’s former anger have soured and shrunk away to the howls of a paranoid psychotic. The death of the “band” has ushered in something new… something evil. Parents worry about the music their children listen to; groups like Slipknot and Korn. They shouldn’t, that is light and easy listening compared to the nightmarish horror evoked by this album. Whilst a highly challenging listen, Flowers of Romance remains an excellent document of the power of the studio as an instrument, and the misery of heroin addiction.
3 comments:
After you listen to this album it will make you want to wear black on the outside, because that is how you'll feel in the inside.
Ha ha.
Moz.
I bought this album years and years ago, played it a few times, and didn't entirely get it. Thanks to your review, I now understand it -- and if I ever get my hands on a turntable again, I'll give it another listen.
andrew, the title of this post is fucking hilarious. you're really good at writing about music. waaaaaay better those those asshats at the stranger.
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