“I haven’t left this room in 14 days,” goes the key line in Floral Tattoo’s most popular song to date. “14 Days” was also the most uplifting song on the Seattle band’s 2018 debut, Approaching Bearable, which should give you an idea of its overall emotional tenor. At least frontperson Alex Anderson was willing to entertain the possibility of breaking free from the feedback loop—the one where the only relief from memories of childhood bullying, the confusion of gender transition, and a demoralizing job at McDonald’s (“Death by Minimum Wage”) was filling up a journal with unflinchingly miserable lyrics. “I wanna write songs that evoke feelings of adventure! I want to write songs that make you want to fall in love!” Anderson cried, while their diaristic lyrics underscored a subtle, purposeful belief that they themselves were too far gone for any of that.
Two years later, Anderson and co-songwriter Gwen Power are still stuck in their apartments, false nostalgia, or dead-end service gigs, but Floral Tattoo’s revelation of a second album goes places: a Minneapolis punk flophouse filled with Twin/Tone vinyl, a college radio station in 1980s Boston or Athens, an mp3 blog in 2008, a five-band Philly gig in 2009 capped by a 10-minute Snowing set. They call their work “music for sad trans people who grew up at the dawn of the digital age,” but You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start is willing to conceive of real moments of happiness, albeit only attainable off the grid. The album opens with “(foreward),” a manifesto for queer revolution, and twice invokes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as anti-capitalist antiheroes, Floral Tattoo’s own Bonnie and Clyde. “She” is every bit as exclamatory as a Los Campesinos!/Against Me! hybrid should be, while the surging acoustic strums of “Leaving” evoke the Cure singles that counterbalanced their monolithic despair with fleeting exuberance. Likewise, as soon we catch a glimpse of Power and Anderson laughing and whooping over the possibility of ditching their possessions and living in a bus headed nowhere, they follow it with a one-minute burst of folk-punk nihilism called “Don’t Try Things.”
In a less fraught moment, this conceptual scope and post-emo shape-shifting might have resulted in something along the lines of Harmlessness or Goodness, albums whose utopian aspirations can feel sadly naive in light of Floral Tattoo’s 2020 reality. They’re a band with big ideas, coloring their feel-bad rainbow with bells, spoken word, melodica, euphonium, and an interpolation of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” But they’re still recording in their apartment, and the lo-fi production that covers everything in a gritty, gray vapor takes on metaphorical heft. With a bigger budget, “Oar House” could’ve fully actualized a majestic rising tide of Pacific Northwest dreamo. But would that really serve a song that commiserates about cleaning toilets? The pixelated distortion of “Oar House” gives it a properly sickly pallor, as if staring through stifled tears at the Puget Sound or driving a shitty car to work with a hangover.
It would be nice to say that Anderson and Power have transmuted their substantial and justifiable anguish into transcendance, and while You Can Never Get Too Much of a Head Start is already one of the year’s first word-of-mouth successes, it’d be a lie to call it a triumph. “The Art of Moving On” and “(my life fell apart this year)” end the album with a rousing, shitfaced salvo of no-fi pub-punk, a rare instance of modern emo that aspires more to The Airing of Grievances than The Monitor. But Floral Tattoo are never subtle, and the titles say it all: If this sounds euphoric, it’s the euphoria of truly hitting bottom, of finding freedom in the knowledge that things can only get better because they can’t get any worse.
