We’ll be honest with you: these days, punk revival is not a kind of music that makes us fall over ourselves. The genre, in most cases, comes across as a stale rehashing of a rudimental style that has lost its true revolutionary meaning. But… that’s just a theoretical statement that completely falls apart the moment you stumble upon a record like Flower’s self-titled EP – because real, powerful music, is stronger than trends and abstract theories about how dead a genre is.
Flower plays unapologetic, ultra-fast hardcore punk. And since real punk is always a political statement, their record feels like a perfectly appropriate aural retribution for the people that have given us the horrifying political spectacle the US has been witnessing. The brutally explosive songs on this record should be played live in the US Congress, to express the only possible rebuttal to the farce American politics have become, as some sort of cathartic ritual that – in the best tradition of ancient Greece – will somehow purify souls through art and partying, and prepare for a new beginning.
What’s most impressive about this band is its incredible tightness at the basis of their relentless and furious energy, something that’s truly hard to pull off from an instrumental standpoint. But it’s the convulsive and possessed high pitch vocals (reminiscent of early Pixies and Rage Against the Machine, but even more intense) that connect directly to our inner instincts, bypassing our rational filters and triggering what rock’n’roll is supposed to trigger: an incontrollable desire for rebellion.
