Psychedelic rock has long been a means to distort and escape reality and, as such, it has a reputation for being a passive, emotionally detached artform, born from the state of being too fucked up to feel. But few contemporary artists seize upon the genre’s disassociative powers with such intensity and urgency as Meatbodies’ Chad Ubovich. Where his band first appeared 10 years ago as a high-octane punk-fueled satellite in the greater Ty Segall Universe, Meatbodies’ transportive ambitions have, perhaps not coincidentally, expanded dramatically as Ubovich has grappled with the many hard-knock realities he’s sought to escape.
After spending most of his 20s on the road with Meatbodies and various other affiliated acts (including Mikal Cronin’s live band and proto-metal power trio Fuzz with Segall and Charlie Moothart), Ubovich reached his physical and mental breaking point after the release of 2017’s Alice and hit the pause button—only to replace the all-consuming mania of tour life with the all-consuming mania of drug use. Upon getting sober, he began working on Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, in 2019, but had to abort mission partway through once COVID lockdowns took effect in early 2020. (While waiting out the pandemic at home, Ubovich and drummer Dylan Fujioka dusted off some scrappy old demos and punched them up for 2021’s stopgap mini-LP, 333.) And once it was safe to properly resume work on Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich lost his home and nearly his life: the house he had been living in for eight years was condemned, but not before its contaminated environs spurred a debilitating case of pneumonia that left Ubovich hospitalized for a month, to the point where his recovery involved relearning how to walk and play his instruments. So if anyone’s earned the right to check out from reality and indulge in the transcendental properties of psychedelic rock, it’s this dude.
But despite all the chaos and upheaval Ubovich has endured, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom is a testament to his clarity of vision. And for Ubovich, that means fine-tuning his iconoclastic inspirations to suit his own feel-good needs: Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom regularly consults the Spacemen 3 playbook for both its fuzz-drone riffs and ambient orchestrations—there’s even an instrumental interlude unsubtly titled “(Return of) Ecstasy”—but applies them to more classically styled ’60s psych-pop tunes; songs like “Billow” mirror the tambourine-rattled stoner sway of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but rock much harder. And while Ubovich shares a mischievous melodic sensibility with his old pal Segall, Meatbodies project more of an anthemic bravado that transforms their niche record-collector concerns into mass-appealing, festival-ready rock music: “The Assignment” imagines how Oasis’ Be Here Now might’ve turned out if the Gallaghers spent more time doing acid than coke, while “Hole” is part DIY “Cherub Rock” grungegaze groover, part Laser Floyd synth spectacle.
However, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom’s kaleidoscopic radiance and rhythmic verve are ultimately vessels for Ubovich’s darkest thoughts. If psychedelia is a portal to an out-of-body experience, Ubovich is floating away with one eye on the ground below, bracing for the moment when the spell is broken and he crashes back down to earth. While “Silly Cybin” appears as a playful, acoustic-based singalong that matches the spirit of its punny title, there are bad-trip horrors and suicidal ideation cataloged within. But if that song establishes a stark contrast between bliss and psychosis, the cryptically titled “ICNNVR2” completely blurs it: “I carve the crosses right into my arms, in the purple drunken dawn,” Ubovich declares, before he rides straight into an incoming brass-blasted storm, much like another stoner-punk who once tried to assure us he was feelin’ alright in the midst of a raging saxocalypse that suggested otherwise.
If Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom is Ubovich’s attempt to channel negative experiences into positive energy, the album’s searing centerpiece, “Move,” is all the more captivating for its refusal to sugarcoat its bitter sentiments. Cut from the same blood-splattered cloth as Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” or The Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy,” the song’s menacing motorik throb and sinister aura are intensified by Ubovich’s spiteful address to a former confindate (“I can count the reasons/ the reasons we don’t talk”), en route to an extended, echo-drenched descent into madness and furious finale. (The track is seven minutes long, but you can easily imagine Meatbodies stretching it out to twice the length in concert and making it their go-to set-closer till the end of time.)
But while “Move” counts as this album’s most agitated and aggressive outburst, you can sense Ubovich finding strength and resolve in its ugly emotional exorcism—the song is effectively a primal-scream and hypno-therapy session all in one. And that sense of catharsis is ultimately what grounds Meatbodies’ hyper-referential rock in the here and now. Among the requsite thank-yous to friends and famliy, Ubovich’s liner notes for Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom include shout-outs to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Spacemen 3, Iggy Pop, and the 13th Floor Elevators “for changng music” and, presumably, his life. But more than just advertise Ubovich’s influences like patches on a jean jacket, those dedications function as Meatbodies’ pledge to honor their legacies—not by merely making music that sounds like theirs, but by furthering their mission of using primal rock‘n’roll as a pathway to spiritual awakening. And with Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich offers a resounding reaffirmation that psych-rock is forever, even if the escape it provides from our cruel world is ultimately temporary.
