The Lavender Flu, Tomorrow Cleaners (MEDS, 2020)
There’s a famous YouTube clip of a Butthole Surfers interview where the band is sitting in a bed, mostly shirtless, with a duvet over their legs covered in cartons of pizza and packs of cigarettes. They’re all clearly on acid, and they start losing themselves in the sound of their voices, repeating letters (P… C… P… L… S… D…) and making sounds until they erupt in an old sea shanty before the speechless interviewer. Yeah, we’re still reviewing the latest album by the Lavender Flu, I just wanted to put that image in your head.
Imagine taking a bunch of 60s psychedelic rock records and leaving them out in the sun for a few days, then covering them with shroom-laced honey, lighting up a giant blunt and trying to play them, you might get close to what ’Tomorrow Cleaners' sounds like. But hyperbole aside, I’m really glad Chris Gunn and his crew (on this record it’s mostly Gunn, anyway) went back recording blown-out weirdo bedroom psych after two more conventional releases like Mow The Glass and Barbarian Dust—which, don’t get me wrong, were great in their own right.
The mood is nocturnal and esoteric: Gunn sounds half-asleep, lost in wordplay about life, death, bugs and feelings, trying to will visions into reality, while guitars, drums, synths and programmed drums swirl around, sometimes catching a song and then falling off after a few bars. The most solid element of this wobbly but intriguing mess is the bass, played by either Gunn himself or Scott Simmons, always very present in the mix and rounded, deep, almost reminiscent of dub music.
There is a darkness in the music: they ain’t no hippies. If you want to have a good time with the Flu, you’d better take what they’re taking and hope you land on the same wavelength, where death and sticky surfaces and strange smells are funny signifiers for a whole ‘nother world. Oh, and I don’t know where to put this observation, so I’ll just leave it here: if you’re thinking “this sounds like something” when the 2nd song on side B starts, it’s “Winter” by The Fall. I went crazy for a little bit until I realized that. You’re welcome.
Click here to listen to Tomorrow Cleaners on Bandcamp.
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