Flowers of Hell is a trans-continental collective of musicians from bands like the Patti Smith Group, Guided By Voices, Bat For Lashes, Spaceman 3, Broken Social Scene, the Clientele, and British Sea Power. Led by Canadian composer/producer/multi-instrumentalist Greg Jarvis, they draw from the dynamics of My Bloody Valentine (for whom they opened in 2008), the darkness of the Velvet Underground, and the astral expansiveness of Spiritualized. Come Hell or High Water, the group's second LP and first with an official American release, nicely balances the cerebral and the emotional.
Jarvis developed the album as an expression of his own synesthesia, a neurological condition in which sufferers perceive mixed sensations (e.g., can see sounds or hear shapes). In making music that is supposed to express the feeling of actually seeing the notes, Jarvis has meticulously crafted pieces (some of these tracks lack the cohesion to be called "songs") that might make you feel like you've have turned on your mp3 software's visualizer. Notes appear out of the ether like mysterious starbursts and then vanish just as quickly; this music, painstakingly created by 30 musicians in over 40 sessions in six cities, bleeds out from a center point, carefully shaping notes from silence.
There is no easy way to describe Come Hell or High Water. This is not sing-along music (there are barely any discernable vocals anyway), nor is it an intellectual exercise to be enjoyed only by other musicians. There is an overall feeling of lightness and geometry to the album, but each track stakes out its own emotional territory and visual landscape. There are deep, belly-rumbling drones that give way to "Heroin"-like sawed strings and accelerated percussion ("Pipe Dreams") and languid forays into humble, acoustic folk-rock that end enveloped by noisy squalls of feedback ("Darklands"). There are moments that sound like strange calls to prayer in sandy far-away lands ("The Invocation") and moments when a bluesy harmonica evolves into a symphonic swell (album opener "Opus 66 Pt. 1"). There are also tracks that are so minimal and grow so slowly that they feel like whispery manifestations of ephemeral elements like smoke or wind (like the improbably named "Forest of Noise").
If there is something perhaps a tad conservative about some of the tracks, if they hew a bit too closely to the tropes of old-fashioned chamber music or linger too long in the realm of traditional arrangements, their use of silence or stinging noise mollifies the predictability. In trying to make his audience understand what his synesthesia feels like, Jarvis becomes something of a magician, granting us the power to hear what music looks like to him, if only for a short time. More often than not, the illusion is convincing.
