If you’ve kept up with Wake the Deaf this year, you’ll probably know that Gay Angel, the band led by Jake Bellissimo, have been busying releasing a mammoth 100-song album entitled Floral. The album was released in four installments, or “bouquets”, over the last six months (see our reviews of parts one and two – and disclaimer that some of those will be recycled for those who missed them first time around). The album’s title is a hint toward the general idea that each song is a blossom arranged just so in a bouquet. Well now all four bouquets have been gathered and displayed as a whole, an incredibly deep and ambitious piece of work which offers an eclectic and exhaustive portrait of the life and mind of its creator.
So where do you begin when reviewing 100 songs? At the start of course!
Floral, Pt. 1
Things open with ‘tempelhofer flughafen’, a slice of anxious sadcore which tells the story of a visit from an old friend and the subsequent experiences of worry and guilt. It’s full of lines like:
“Two times i’ll call him, two times i said…
two times i thought that i’d never see him again.
i’m so afraid that he won’t like me because one time he said that he was in love with me.
so two times i’ll hang up, i’ll put down my phone…
i’ll put down the vicodin that got me to pick up the phone”.
The second track, ‘the words i read’, introduces some of the array of instruments, including drums, piano and trumpet, and deals with the collapse of a relationship Bellissimo had with an older man, with how things (including people) change with time and how actions and events are open to ever-changing interpretation. The album then takes its first foray into instrumentalism, from guitar-based compositions to toy piano lullabies. ‘silly river’ is a song about solipsism, about how the bad things disappear when you close your eyes, but also about how you can’t close your eyes forever:
“If I blink my eyes the world goes away
but if I leave them closed the solitude never does stay
…So I’ll keep them this way
because no matter how much I sleep
the birds still sing the river still rings
and there are still four seasons.”
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Floral continues in this vein across its 25 tracks, alternating between lo-fi pop and rather more experimental touches. ‘i refuse to fall’ sounds like early Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, while ‘trouble in tahiti’ is all screeching noise and unintelligible voices, like whale song for the industrial age.
Floral Pt. 2
Pt. 2 kicks off with a sound clip from a Valentine’s Day advertisement, complete with a little kids wishing you a “HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! (yuck!)”, before getting into the music proper. Like Pt. 1, this is a surprisingly cohesive blend of orchestral chamber pop and lo-fi, DIY bedroom recording. ‘growing leaves’ is wordy and impassioned, sounding not unlike Nana Grizol or Defiance, Ohio, as Bellissimo yelps lines such as “I wish I could still drive a fucking car without being afraid of what I see on the road”.
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This is followed by the amp-frying lo-fi of ‘on a screen’, and then the comparatively breezy ‘i made peace’, which contains the line, “I made a mistake, I downloaded the first season of the Golden Girls instead of the Gilmore Girls. I got the wrong girls, and it’s not a big deal, it’s just the little mistakes are the ones that annoy me.” This would stand out on any album, but even more so here as it precedes, ‘i have a flower’, a song quite literally from the past. Incredibly, the song was written by Bellissimo’s great-grandfather, and this is the original recording made in the 30s by him and his friends. It’s a bona fide love song:
“I have a flower for you to wear. It is a flower so sweet and fair. Never a garden it knew. Never the sun, never the dew.
It never looked at the blue sky, this flower I give to you cannot die. You may throw it away, you may tear it apart. ’tis not a flower, ’tis my heart.”
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The rest of the album is equally as varied – ‘letter to brazil’ details a period Bellissimo spent in Brazil as a teenager and sounds almost like doo wop, while ‘i won’t take ecstasy’ is pretty sad, containing the line, “I wish I had someone to make the bad parts of my life not seem so bad.” Add to that ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’, a pseudo-biographical account of the father of the atomic bomb and ‘in flight’, with its oddly surreal guitar and bursts of ominous mechanical noise: “Last night I fell into a hole”, Bellissimo sings, “I thought it was an episode of The Twilight Zone.” The album also contains several instrumental interludes, including two botanically named piano tracks (‘an orchid’ and ‘a tulip’) and two which rely on the unmistakable sound of an organ (one of which, the final track, clocks in at over 24 minutes!). There are further eccentric flourishes, such as ‘whose fault is it?’, which sounds like a weird vocal test, and ‘music is stupid’, a collection of audio recordings of people saying just that.
Floral Pt. 3
If you’ve made it this far then you’ll probably know what to expect from pt. 3. It opens with dramatic orchestral swells, before segueing into ‘love’, a steady, Magnetic Fields-style pop song with a jaunty, 80s/90s-cheese sax line. ‘the library’ comes crashing into being before settling into a fun slice of indie pop that uses Bellissimo’s library late fees as a metaphor for everything else he has on hold:
“i went to the library today
and i realized i couldn’t run away
from the things i thought i didn’t have to see
if i close my eyes, the world is easier to deal with”
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‘summer voicemails’ is an oddly lovely little song full of “ooh ooh oohs” and “doo doo doos” and pitter patter percussion. The lyrics are delivered in little interludes and are comprised of messages Bellissimo wishes he could have left at various points in the past. In his own words, “I’ve had a lot of different summers out in a field, looking at the stars. i always wanted to call home, call someone, tell them how i’m feeling, leave a voicemail, but there is never cell phone service up there. these are a few of those moments from various years that would have become voicemails if i had service.” ‘getting up, falling over’ sounds like a prewar tune playing on a damaged wireless, with a strange wonky viola aria accompanied by squeaking jolts of static and distortion from a guitar. The track is one of a varying multitude of instrumentals on Pt. 3, each of which is its own distinct entity (just check the contributors in the liner notes!), such as the harp-based ‘wildflowers, wild thorn’, the dark and shadowy ‘i’m not sorry for anything’ and ‘running my fingers through your hair’, which is all twinkling xylophone. One of my favourite tracks is ‘dreaming at the keyboard’ which was again written and performed by Bellissimo’s great-grandfather Bill Vuono. Placed in the context of the rest of the album the song sounds like listening through the walls as ghosts from a byegone age relieve happy memories.
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Things get even more experimental (and a little x-rated) towards the end which won’t be to everyone’s taste, but Bellissimo’s strengths is his willingness to put everything on display, whether it makes for easy listening or not.
Floral Pt. 4
Maybe it’s just me, but Pt. 4 seems to have a slightly different feeling to the rest of the parts. It feels lighter both in the sense of it seeming weightless and less dark, and I think this is a result of it facing thoughts on death and heaven (hence the artwork). The list of contributors is also much shorter this time around, although the array of instruments still puts the majority of albums to shame. And remember, this is Gay Angel – eccentric eclecticism is their speciality, so expect plenty of tracks to contradict this statement. The first track is ‘welcome to heaven’, a very gentle song comprised mainly of xylophone and soft vocals. The lyrical content is darker though, written about a time in Bellissimo’s life in which he was suffering with paranoia-inducing mental illness and became convinced that two people were trying to kill him. The lyrics deal with his then belief that he would have to beat them to it and get to heaven himself. Thankfully, he seems a lot better now, and it’s a testament to his strength that he is able to project these struggles into the world.
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‘no better’ is a folk song for the twenty-first century, with tumbling guitars and lyrics about life in the city which meditate on the reasons for washing every day (or, as Bellissimo puts it, “when i shower, who is it for? do i keep myself clean for whoever touches my body next? do i actually care about how i look to others? or do i just like cleaning, scrubbing at something?”). ‘your light’ somehow lives up to its name, a bright glowing drone and ‘a dahlia’ sounds like a delicate old music box in a musty attic. ‘a rose’ sounds like the bedroom pop of someone like Cyberbully Mom Club or Free Cake For Every Creature, while ‘train thoughts’ is quite literally that, a collection of sad thoughts Bellissimo had about his dog and his grandma while on public transport. The whole thing finishes with ‘gay angel’, a self-titled track which ends things on a powerful note:
“and so i’ll know that days are often short
and it’s my job to make them feel as long as
i can trust myself with (in order to be strong)
let’s see if i can really last that long.i’ll grow a pair of gorgeous wings
and clean my lungs so i can start to sing.you’ll see me up there someday
and after all we’ve been through
i don’t think i can ever say
‘i’m glad we had this talk,
so let’s go back to our lives and learn to walk.'”
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Floral is a bold artistic statement, an unflinching portrait of a rich, messy and confusing life. It sounds like Bellissimo’s every single thought and dream translated into music and committed to tape, mixing moments of gentle beauty with grating ugliness and frank confessions too obscene for the radio. It’s not going to be for everyone, but to me that’s just another reason to admire it.
You can get the entire thing in a deluxe box set (with cool extras such as old sheet music and photographs) for just twenty US dollars, via the Gay Angel Bandcamp page. You can also download all one hundred songs on a name-your-price basis at the same page. Once you’ve bought it, be sure to follow Bellissimo’s notes and photos at Drunk With Love.