The Garbage and The Flowers announce new album ‘Cinnamon Sea’

You know that feeling when you’re balancing on a chair; leaning back like you’re going to fall but just teetering like you’re weightless, that’s the sound of ‘Cinnamon Sea’, the title track from the new The Garbage & The Flowers’ record; an echoey thrum that sounds like the whole band are only just clinging to semi-consciousness. Gouged eyes are mentioned but it’s so mellow; and that riff is so familiar, so comforting.

It’s preceded by the dreampop gem ‘Eye Know Who You Are’, a tantalising piece of Mazzy Star on steroids, a spiralling sonic rumble, that reaches a miasmic high on every hummed chorus.

It opens the Pandora’s box of this release, a sleight of ear collection of five songs from this cosmology-observing Australia-based outfit.

‘Red Star’ exists in a land where sound levels are destroyed by savage birds. ‘On The Radio’ trips into an untuned lagoon.  There’s a quasi-religious zeal to proceedings, a nod to Sterling Morrison’s Velvet strum elsewhere, everything that would have been key to the Elephant 6 conglomerate not so long ago, maybe, if you can even imagine, My Bloody Valentine unplugged.

‘Cinnamon Sea’ was recorded in an abandoned courthouse in Freyerstown, a ghostly village in Victoria’s Goldfields in Southeast Australia, where you’re more likely to meet giant grey kangaroos bounding on its dusty main street than tottering prospectors these days. It unravels with claustrophobic glee as we traverse the structured climes of exemplary songwriting seasoned with the salt of improvisation. This from a band who previously released an album famously dubbed ‘Stoned Rehearsal’. It closes with the track ‘Jacob B’, a melancholy tale that’s a hybrid of Manson’s troubled tunes and the psychedelic folk songs of Quicksilver’s Dino Valente.

“What I loved about the music we created,” Torben Tilly, a travelling G&F troubadour mused, “is that it sounded like it had come from somewhere faraway, that it had travelled a lot of distance and gathered some dust and debris along the way.”

File under: outsider music for insiders.