Alternatively, Flowers Ocean Tiger Bloom’s kaleidoscopic radiance and rhythmic verve are in the long run vessels for Ubovich’s darkest ideas. If psychedelia is a portal to an out-of-body revel in, Ubovich is floating away with one eye at the floor beneath, bracing for the instant when the spell is damaged and he crashes backpedal to earth. Whilst “Foolish Cybin” seems as a playful, acoustic-based singalong that fits the spirit of its punny name, there are bad-trip horrors and suicidal ideation cataloged inside of. But when that tune establishes a stark distinction between bliss and psychosis, the cryptically titled “ICNNVR2” utterly blurs it: “I carve the crosses proper into my fingers, within the crimson drunken daybreak,” Ubovich pronounces, prior to he rides immediately into an incoming brass-blasted hurricane, just like every other stoner-punk who as soon as attempted to guarantee us he used to be feelin’ alright in the middle of a raging saxocalypse that urged in a different way.
If Flowers Ocean Tiger Bloom is Ubovich’s try to channel unfavorable studies into certain power, the album’s searing centerpiece, “Transfer,” is the entire extra charming for its refusal to sugarcoat its sour sentiments. Lower from the similar blood-splattered material as Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” or The Gun Membership’s “For the Love of Ivy,” the tune’s menacing motorik throb and sinister charisma are intensified through Ubovich’s spiteful deal with to a former confindate (“I will be able to rely the explanations/ the explanations we don’t communicate”), en path to a longer, echo-drenched descent into insanity and livid finale. (The observe is seven mins lengthy, however you’ll simply believe Meatbodies stretching it out to two times the duration in live performance and making it their go-to set-closer until the top of time.)
However whilst “Transfer” counts as this album’s maximum agitated and competitive outburst, you’ll sense Ubovich discovering power and get to the bottom of in its unpleasant emotional exorcism—the tune is successfully a primal-scream and hypno-therapy consultation multi functional. And that sense of catharsis is in the long run what grounds Meatbodies’ hyper-referential rock within the right here and now. A number of the requsite thank-yous to pals and famliy, Ubovich’s liner notes for Flowers Ocean Tiger Bloom come with shout-outs to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Spacemen 3, Iggy Pop, and the thirteenth Flooring Elevators “for changng tune” and, probably, his existence. However extra than simply put it up for sale Ubovich’s influences like patches on a jean jacket, the ones dedications serve as as Meatbodies’ pledge to honor their legacies—no longer through simply making tune that feels like theirs, however through furthering their undertaking of the usage of primal rock‘n’roll as a pathway to religious awakening. And with Flowers Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich gives a powerful reaffirmation that psych-rock is endlessly, even though the break out it supplies from our merciless global is in the long run transient.
