ARTIST: The Fluoride Program
TITLE: Roadside Flowers
LABEL: One After Records
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 206kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 45m total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-00-00
RIP DATE: 2006-10-30
Track List
----------
1. Faster 1:47
2. Lucas 6:08
3. Designs 3:53
4. All Is Still In Working Order 5:35
5. By Proxy, By Love 5:50
6. Coma 3:24
7. On Your Side 3:34
8. Cowards 10:10
9. Sundial 5:17
Release Notes:
The Fluoride Program's first full-length release builds upon the promise that
their 2005 EP Bastion hinted at. The group whispers and screams with a bright
tunefulness and a sense of dynamic that is in rare supply in most of their
post-rock contemporaries. Ever since Radiohead apparently decided that guitars
were old hat, many indie rockers have relied on twiddling electronics to build
the walls of their sonic architecture, but on Roadside Flowers, the Fluoride
Program injects piano, layers of harmony vocals, and even the occasional viola
into the scree and wail of guitars and rolling hi-hat to build a textural feel
without the overused drone of synthesized sound. This is a real band, playing in
time with each other, and pushing sound around a real room. The totemic pulse of
the album's highlight, "Lucus," puts drummer Steve Bekkala and guitarist Justin
King (doing a startling Jonny Greenwood impression, whether he knows it or not)
into a locked-horns battle of percussion and distorted strings. The song only
reaches climactic conclusion when the tolling bell of Steve Motrinc's bass
ushers in Dmitri Vada's impassioned vocals, acting as a divine referee and
bringing unification to the song's cinematic conclusion. The abrupt thunderclap
that ends "Designs" after a collision of soundscape gives way to another
screenplay, this time evoking "The Great Gig in the Sky" as interpreted by the
Velvet Teen on "All Is Still in Working Order." The album peaks in the
ten-minute epic "Cowards," which reaches levels of prog indulgence ù shifting
time signatures and tempos, offering bright noodling guitar lines in the
beginning, only to be obliterated by a stomping factory of unexpected dissonant
guitar and Emotional Rescue-era back-alley funk. Roadside Flowers is quietly put
to bed with the simple "Sundial," a molasses-slow makeout session of Stax soul
instrumentation and summertime AM pop. "Quietly we've become older than we care
to admit/At sundown we'll meet again." This entire album takes more turns than a
game of Othello between two seven year olds, and is equally full of unexpected
surprises: just when the whole thing starts to make sense, the colors all flip
and the game begins anew.