Doom Flower is a Chicago-based band consisting primarily of Jess Price (guitar/vocals) and Bobby Burg (bass), with Matt Lemke and Areif Sless-Kitain joining on synths and drums respectively. After releasing an EP back in 2019, Price and Burg got together in March 2020 to work on new material, though the process was curtailed by the pandemic. Luckily, Burg soon realised Chicago’s Electrical Audio was ventilated (originally to allow smoking within), meaning Doom Flower could continue to bloom and record their self-titled full-length album, which is now out via ‘record label’.
Those familiar with Price’s work in Campdogzz will find lines between In Rounds and Doom Flower, though the two records are outwardly very different. The Campdogzz record sounded “scorched and dangerous,” we wrote in a preview, its sense of scale and weight lending the foreboding air of an approaching storm. While no less evocative, Doom Flower’s style is altogether more insular. Something more reserved, conjuring spaces small and introspective. As though the portent came good and a storm ravaged the land, leaving Price to pick through the wreckage and attempt to construct something resembling a life from the pieces.
Tracks like ‘Get a Job’ and ‘Anything’ wind their way through such a space, bereft of everything but unanswered questions. The environment might lack the Biblical weight of those conjured by Campdogzz, but they are no less hostile. The uneasy aftermath of something. A world of inherent sadness and suffering, the small cruelty of day to day living.
Which is not to paint listening to Doom Flower as an emotionally numb experience. There’s a certain anxiety throughout, be it the simmering, volatile kind present on ‘Headlights’ to the lightheaded, otherworldly sway of ‘House Warp’. This needling dread marbles with the overarching melancholy of the album, and this juxtaposition of stillness and movement gets under the skin. Take ‘Thrill Wheel’, an ostensibly slow, hushed track which hides a building disquiet. An opaque vessel filled slowly, holding for now but always threatening to spill over.
Doom Flower is out via Record Label and you can get it now from Bandcamp, including a vinyl edition.
