It’s as fortunate as it is telling that Empty Flowers didn’t look to Kickstarter to fund their new remix album, The Air You Found. Though the tense New England quartet is itself only two years old, the music they make definitively harkens back at least two decades—when the term indie rock felt a lot less amorphous, when rich regional scenes formed in the most surprising places, when bands from Slint and Shellac to Girls Against Boys and Archers of Loaf shaped their own bleeding edge. On two short LP’s, 2012’s SIX and last year’s FIVE, they’ve taken those acts and their associates as chief inspirations, retrenching those sounds with a little metal heaviness. Had Slint made it past Spiderland and tried to concoct a three-minute, tough-guy radio single for the Alternative Nation set, it might have sounded like Empty Flowers’ “Quit”. The knotty shape and recalcitrant delivery of “Police” suggest a songwriter with an affinity for Unsane and Unwound. Their music suits a crowd for which “remix” can be a dirty word—a gimmicky addition to MAXI CD singles or, these days, the source of an inane viral video hit. Asking such people even to listen to a full LP of such recastings might rightfully raise some questions and eyebrows. Would you really want to hear the house edit of “Breadcrumb Trail”, let alone help pay for it?
Against most odds, The Air You Found is a wonderful seven-song set that delights on its own terms and suggests new possibilities for Empty Flowers, a young band previously hidebound to the past. Empty Flowers’ original “Call a Priest” was a cocksure standoff, with frontman Christian McKenna offering vague threats over flinty guitars and a distant din. But Kevin Hufnagel detects a core of despair in McKenna’s tone and isolates his voice, building around it an ornate cathedral of acoustic guitar. Working as Crone, former Isis member Jeff Caxide inverts the guitar-centric aggression of “Ice on Wings” entirely. He turns the songs into a funhouse mirror drone, where Vocoder vocals pass above a static hum and between space-rock keyboards. There is a beat-machine-buffeted industrial rendering (from Dälek leader Will Brooks, now working as iconAclass) and a collage that pulls a song’s pieces apart and reassembles them in purposely oblong shapes (courtesy of James Plotkin, a nominal metal guy comfortable with infinite genre splices).
But the most engaging pieces here are the ones that don’t subvert or collapse Empty Flowers’ own takes but instead treat them as starting points. Tombs frontman Michael Hill reinforces the anxiety of “Resonate” with massive drums and blanketing synthesizers. He tumbles McKenna’s shouts through a revolving wheel of distress, turning a noise-rock song into a blackened noise span that would feel at home on Hospital Productions. Jesu and Godflesh founder Justin Broadrick keys on the presiding drama of and subtle organ peals beneath “Car Fires”, one of Empty Flowers’ best songs. He lets the number plow ahead as intended, but pads out the song beneath it, using the organ as an invitation to place the tune over a bed of luminous choirs and keys. Where the original tune ends, Broadrick marches ahead, using the song’s melody and meter to create a radiant instrumental coda. Its simultaneous heaviness and heavenliness sound like a perfect marriage of Jesu and Sigur Rós. But the Empty Flowers’ song serves as the anchor, preventing the remix from drifting away in its own ethereality.
As compelling as the tracks on The Air You Found can be, what’s most intriguing about the collection is what’s not there: new material from Empty Flowers. Despite their rather rigid songs, they have occasionally shown traces of influences outside of canonical indie and math rock and metal. “Call a Priest”, from SIX, sounds like a missing link between Eric Bachmann’s work in Archers of Loaf and Crooked Fingers, but Empty Flowers added a surprising filigree of digital bursts over its top. And the widescreen arc of “Trained Not to Worry”, from FIVE, suggests the filmic ambitions of the most efficient post-rock acts. But those are only passing moments in a catalogue of consistency. Might these collaborations, however, push Empty Flowers out of their to-date accomplished revivalism, showing them just how far the source of their sounds can be stretched? Imagining them taking austere acoustic detours of their own accord (as Hufnagel has them do) or turning into a drone ensemble (as Crone reshapes them) is a daunting stretch. But perhaps they can borrow those accents from this experience and use the extra textures to finesse their attack. That’s the real brilliance of Broadrick’s rendition of “Car Fires”, which preserves the idea and attitude of the original but shows that the song’s slow-march backbone is only that—an origin, or a central point from which the song and the band itself can spread. Empty Flowers could do well to follow that example.
