Flowers Too - CD
Description
What is pop doing today? It fills our heads, sometimes it lifts us up. It invents sparingly, it steals a bit, it copies a lot. It still walks beside us, it also torments us. Now and then it exhilarates us, often it diminishes us. But what it hardly does anymore is make us dream — truly dream, with our eyes open as well as closed.
That is precisely where Dorian Pimpernel returns.
For if their first album, ALLOMBON, could be seen as the opening of a secret passage, this second record, “FLOWERS TOO,” is something else: no longer the discovery of a world, but its methodical exploration, its feverish mapping, its deepening down to the underground layers. Where contemporary psychedelia seems at a standstill, where ecstasy has lost its effect, where the vast territories of the imagination have been parceled out, signposted, monetized — they are still digging. And deeper.
Esoteric pop — the noblest, the most dangerous kind — is no longer practiced on the surface. It has left the grand avenues to take refuge in hidden laboratories, mental back rooms, basements buried deeper still than those of garage, punk, or black metal. That is where the secret society Dorian Pimpernel has been working for years, with an obstinacy that feels less like a career than a calling.
Their first album laid the foundations of a language, a climate, a possibility. This one is its inner chamber.
The five members — that drummer fascinated by Antiquity, that part-time philosopher songwriter, that polymorphous filmmaker-composer, that record-possessed bassist-archivist, that singer long secluded with his guitar — have not changed in nature. But their music has mutated. Denser. More coherent. More inhabited.
Still far from the classic pattern of “a bunch of friends starting a band,” they pursue their strange project: moonshine pop, the nocturnal, lunatic, sometimes venomous underside of Californian sunshine pop. Except that here, the concept is no longer an aesthetic hypothesis — it’s a territory. Johan no longer speaks of a sketch, but of a world. A world built brick by brick, record by record, where every sound, every timbre, every intention has its place like in a secret architecture.
If the first album opened the door, this second one pushes you inside — so far that it will be your dreams, and perhaps your nightmares, that must host the creatures dwelling there.
Like the half-literary, half-magical books of the Renaissance, this record functions as a closed yet infinite system. Each song is both fragment and totality: autonomous, yet perforated, inhabited by the vertiginous feeling that other rooms, other corridors, exist right next door. The whole forms a labyrinth whose map one can study… or choose to get lost in.
For whether one is a manic exegete or a simple nocturnal wanderer, one thing strikes first: it’s pop.
Great melody. Immediate, supple, luminous — even when it speaks from the shadows. If their art belongs to esotericism, it does so in the manner of Alice in Wonderland: gently, in colors, with a smile that hides abysses.
Their influences are still there, but more deeply digested: the learned psychedelia of the ’60s, the dreamed bridges between Canterbury and Düsseldorf, haunted film scores, rare synthesizers and old guitars that populate their studio-cabinet of curiosities. Except here, none of this is quoted anymore — it breathes. It lives. It acts.
One could speak of a French form of hauntology, but less turned toward nostalgia than toward activating ghosts. As if they were speaking an ancient language, yes — but in a way that fully belongs to the new world, even if that world does not yet know it needs it.
On the surface, this music seems to come from yesterday.
In depth, it is strictly contemporary: ambiguous, shimmering, unstable, vibrant. But also — and above all — harmonious, immediate, deliciously toxic, of an almost suspicious beauty.
The real surprise is that this second album already has the density of a mature work. In its themes — lost illusions, roads leading nowhere, parallel worlds brushed against but never inhabited — as in its form: no longer merely a proposition, but a fully realized manifesto.
The dream machine is running again.
And this time, it runs without an instruction manual.
Tracklist
2. Twisted Charm Honey
3. Caravelle
4. Flor en la Sombra
5. Marching Clocks
6. Circular Rites
7. Oruga Encantada
8. Sur la Lune
9. Brücke
10. Photochromic gaze
11. A Rising year
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