Musical restraint is often confused with abstinence-- the idea is that artists are constantly warring with a natural compulsion towards adding that extra vocal overdub or drum solo or two-minute coda and should be rewarded for “winning.” Montreal's Braids made restraint feel a lot less theoretical on their 2011 debut Native Speaker and the results were often fascinating. The songs averaged about seven minutes and made no secret about the influence of Animal Collective at their most hormonally charged. But they weren’t defined by indulgence so much as a Hulk-like instability. "Lammicken" had a single, telling lyric-- "I can't stop it." When Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s soft-spoken surrealism exploded into carnal caterwauling and the band’s intricate interplay gave way to washes of free-form noise, you sensed that Braids had to work their asses off just to keep themselves in check, and were doing it for our good and theirs as well. Braids appear to have their impulses under control two years later, and if Native Speaker drew its power from being the proverbial tip of the iceberg, Flourish // Perish is the iceberg itself, impressive and monolithic, cold and impenetrable.
Perhaps it’s not all that surprising, as Montreal has seen a chill come over it since entering 2013 as indie's hottest city-- Majical Cloudz’s *Impersonator *achieved a glacial, barren beauty, something like sunlight on the Antarctic, while Doldrums disappeared into his laptop with static-laden, cracked pop. Grimes did somewhat likewise, retreating from music and relating her experiences with incisive and invective Tumblr posts. Then there’s Preston, the first in the scene to receive widespread attention; the humid romance of 2010’s Blooming Summer was a distant memory for her side project Blue Hawaii, as Untogether was filled with disaffected, click-and-whir electro laments that could be taken as a commentary on an artistic community that’s grown apart from each other.
On first exposure, it can feel like Flourish // Perish is an extension of Untogether rather than a complement. Pared down to a trio after losing founding member Kate Lee, Braids all but ditched their guitars and got deep into programming and sequencers. As such, Feels has been exchanged for mind music-- the mechanistic Flourish is heavy on turn of the century Warp (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher) and Warp-influenced crossover acts, i.e., Björk ca. Vespertine and Radiohead. Hermetic and kinetic, the band’s production bears the mark of “intelligent dance music”, not because it’s smarter than other electronic forms (as if that could be quantified) but due to its mirroring of cerebral function. The songs here are built from short, synaptic and repetitive firing, tiny loops, short glitches, silvery hooks that corkscrew into your memory.
It’s an interesting and daring turn for Braids, retaining the complicated, prog-like arrangements of their past while working within the textures of IDM and minimal techno. The spaciousness and clarity of Flourish does make it an easy record to return to; while challenging, it’s not a difficult listen. This is crucial, as the underlying rhythm beds rarely give Braids much melodic structure and put the focus on Preston’s lyrics, which are simultaneously more poetic and yet less evocative than her past work.
On Native Speaker, Preston functioned like an anthropologist in the wild, experiencing the strange rhythms and rituals of those around her, journaling the frightening results without judgment. There’s a scientific method to Flourish, where she’s inquisitive, probing and more concerned with challenging her own findings within clinical surroundings. Examples of self-examination and self-recrimination abound on Flourish-- Preston’s ego is a bed too comfortable to leave, her head a lake in which to drown. Yet, she maintains critical distance and for that reason, Braids are a lot tougher to read here. On the whispery morning-after ballad “Girl”, a lover serves as a mirror for the narrator’s inadequacies rather than comfort: “Every day I wake/ To sunlight on his face/ He is so care free/ Why can I not be.” On “Hossak”, Preston acknowledges “a boy knocking outside my window with a slice of pizza” with the eerie absenteeism of someone describing a UFO sighting.
The extraterrestrial quality cuts both ways. Flourish is a purposefully alien and repetitive album, and at the outset, it works-- the fractious, percussive rhythms of "Victoria" and "December'' are hypnotic, as is the overlay of high, diaphonous cooing atop Preston's spoken word during "Freund". But in the second half, the iterance becomes tedious; footholds are few amidst the long stretches of vast electronic tundra and the Perish side B can feel like a sheer drop towards revelatory closer “In Kind".
In a way, it makes you want to try and listen to Flourish // Perish in reverse-- “In Kind” feels like a continuation of Native Speaker, with the same kind of cresting dynamics and the one time where Preston lets off a scream, a satisfying, feral shriek that almost compensates for its lack thereof prior. And there’s also its introductory lyric, “I must have saw a girl/ Who looked a lot like myself ... knowing all the answers/ And it is a problem.” And if that’s the problem of this intriguing but insular album, the solution is found on “Victoria”-- “My father always said/ To get out of my head/ Maybe he meant to see what's next to me.” That’s the first line on Flourish // Perish, and the one that Braids could be wise to heed going forward.
