These Flowers of Ours

Album Review

In the liner notes to These Flowers of Ours, we're treated to a brief description of the Asteroid No. 4's workshop, where across the room from an extensive shrine to the history of shoegaze the bass player watches a bootleg video of the Rain Parade while rolling a joint on the back of a Teenage Fanclub album. And if that sounds like a place you'd enjoy visiting, then These Flowers of Ours is doubtless the sort of record you'd like to spend some time with. Floating through an echoey netherworld of jangling and roaring guitars, subsonic bass, thundering drums, and vocals that drift as clouds through the paisley atmosphere, this music is space rock at its most engaging and organic, psychedelia that's timeless because the music sounds too languid and loose-limbed to bother committing itself to any decade in particular. Not that this stuff sounds lazy — These Flowers of Ours is an album that is dense and impressively rich for all the space in the music, and while melody often seems to be an afterthought in this sort of stuff, the Asteroid No. 4 rival Outrageous Cherry in their ability to write tunes with actual hooks to accompany their flights of guitar-fueled aeronautics. These Flowers of Ours is almost too much of a good thing at times, soaring so far into the ether that it has a hard time making its way back to Earth, and at 54 minutes this album begins wearing out its welcome in the later chapters. But what's good here is very good indeed, and the Asteroid No. 4 are advised not to lose the lease on their command center anytime soon — when they can make it off of the couch, they're on to something quite impressive.