I'd been listening to Flaamingos for a couple weeks before curiosity got the best of me. A quick image search confirmed my every suspicion: Flaamingos aren't the smiling kind. The LA duo's self-titled debut is steely, stone-faced, black-coffee-and-cigarette music. Between the hissing synths, the icepick guitars, the rattling drum machines and the baritone desperation, Flaamingos' grey pallored gloom-rock is somewhere in the same shadowy neighborhood of early Depeche Mode, or the Echo and the Bunnymen songs you never hear on the radio. Frontman Jerry Narrows sings-- moans, really-- of "sick salvation," of "wrestling a ghost," of "Fractured Love" and "Modern Behavior" with the weight of the world on his slumped shoulders.
Theirs is a murky sort of melancholy: though Narrows opens wide on most of Flaamingos' choruses, he mumbles his way through these verses, unpursing his lips only to replace a spent Lucky Strike. (Unfiltered, I'm sure.) Fizzling, squealing synths come in twos and threes, which-- when coupled with the rigid drum programming found of most of Flaamingos-- gives the disc its been-a-while-since-we-left-this-basement-hasn't-it claustrophobia. Narrows stews, wallows, declares himself all but unfit for humanity; "Explicitly, all I wanna do is live," he sings on the album's first track, then spends the rest of it making you wonder how true that could be. "If by chance you seek romance, sorry to say, I'm not fit to stay," he moans on Flaamingos closer "Creation." That's more like it.
Flaamingos is muggy, glum, just shy of agoraphobic, a not-undanceable bummer for the type of people who leave their trenchcoats on indoors. In essence, it's new wave, even if there's nothing particularly new about it; the band's SEO-enhanced moniker might be their only concession to anything more modern than, oh, Black Celebration. This particular strain of mope-rock never really went away, but right now, it's having another little moment; Flaamingos' fellow left-coasters Crocodiles and Weekend each have new records steeped in a similar synthy, sighing darkness.
Lyrically, Narrows often seems a bit stuck inside his own head. He wisely sidesteps the maudlin brood of many of his contemporaries, but the way he jumps from image to fragmented image makes for a slightly scattered listen. And, while they've got a way with desperation-- never better than on "She's Never Satisfied", with its cracking "there's only one of us in ecstasy on this night" refrain-- these songs lose their centers whenever tempos slow. But, where so much mopey post-punk/early new wave revivalism gets itself stuck in the shadows-- letting foul moods cloud out anything resembling a novel melody or a texture any lighter than dark grey-- Flaamingos have a way of slipping just enough color into their songs to keep Flaamingos from turning into a total drag.
"In between the lines, there's texture, colored by an active mind," Narrows sings on the dubbed-from-Dolby "Digital Dialogue.". With so much of Flaamingos outlined in charcoal-- the deadpan verses, the chest-clutching choruses, and Narrows' pining, self-lacerating lyrics-- any color's left to the detail-work. This, truly, is where Flaamingos excel. Little bursts of neon jut out through the darkness and momentarily light up the night. Terse synth-popper "Expressions" is just another lonely night at the danceclub until a slippery little guitar lick works its way out from the backdrop, casting Narrows' gunmetal-black lamentations in a far more flattering blacklight-purple. "All I Wanna Do Is Live" offsets its pleading verses with a downright symphonic synth line, raising Narrows' inner drama to cinematic heights. It doesn't always work; the reverb-spackled "Fall With Me" wobbles as if encased in Jello, and from time to time, all these burbling baselines and dust-ridden drum machines crowd Narrows out of his own frame. But, while the dark and narrow path Flaamingos finds itself on sometimes gets a little cramped, these moments of luminosity help keep Flaamingos from retreating too far into the fog.
