Echo & the Bunnymen Album: “Flowers”

The rare and underappreciated gift of Echo and the Bunnymen is their ability to conjure mind movies. You might not see ghost bicycles plying a silver dome-skied heaven like I do, but if you listen, you'll see something.

This new work, in particular, shimmers with aesthetic intensity. Even when you're tempted to write off a line here or there as trite or cliched, Ian McCulloch's resonant voice saves it. Will Sergeant's guitar bundles an immense array of melodic sound around the band's strong rhythms.

Everything is organically unified. The vocals and the guitar at times peer through cautious fingers into vaulting spanses of cosmic space that music has failed to probe for years or maybe forever. Songs like "SuperMellowMan" are as melodic as they are uncharted.

The themes, as usual, insinuate themselves onto an emotional plain dominated by the weight of mortality, especially on "Buried Alive," the spacey ballad "Burn for Me," and the title track.

The celebration of life is present, too, on energetic but melodic "Everybody Knows" and "Life Goes On," both of bear ties to earlier works.

This is a stunning album that deserves far more attention than it is likely ever to get. That in itself makes it not only significant, but important.

If you care to make a difference in a wasteland culture and an industry hell-bent for mindless, craftless idiocy, get this album.

And don't download it; buy it.

Many old Echo fans bemoaned the "soft" sound of the last album, "What are you gonna do...". I thought it was brilliant. The elder statesbunnymen were getting older and wiser. These were the sounds of ocean rain pattering on a roof that had seen lot of changes since the crystal days of yesteryear. They invited us to "get in the car" and go for a ride; with "Flowers", they take us on a trip into space, and what a trip it is... The title track treats us to a spooky and hooky theremin riff. While it's not faster than a speeding bullet, nor able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, "SuperMellowMan" has Supermac revealing his vulnerable side ("...will you talk me through till dawn, never felt so lost and lonely") while in the energetic "It's Alright", he makes it clear that he ain't no pushover ("I need more not less, and don't ever tell me when to stop"). My personal fave track is "Buried Alive". I don't know a killing moon from a Delvaux moon, but the way Mac croons about how "childhood's end came too soon" communicates something that few songs nowadays do- and the guitar lick that drones in the background reminds me of how Bowie's "Heroes" might have sounded in another lifetime. Throughout, Will shreds, jangles, smolders, and combusts on the guitars, Mac does his thing on the mic, and melodies ring sweet but not saccharine. The album closes with the words "one night, your sea will melt into my ocean" ("Burn for Me"). Water. Flowers. Hearts. Flames...

Echo and the Bunnymen put out some of the best albums of the 80s. Electrafixion, the Will and Mac project of the early 90s was amazing. But the reunion albums left me a little cold. Neither Evergreen or WAYGTDWYL were terrible, but just a little too occasionally schmaltzy for me to give them too many listens. Then, here comes Flowers. It's a rager! Will's strange guitar sounds and trippy song structures, Mac's beautiful screwdriver and cigarettes voice...the reunion has peaked!!! This album is easily in my top 10 for the year. Let's hope they can keep pulling off this sort of amazing music in the future. This is one of the few 80s "reunion" bands worth hearing again.

I must admit I am a little surprised to see some negative reviews here for this record. I am of the camp that thinks (or thought, anyway) that Echo lost it after Ocean Rain. Well this album proved me very wrong.

Only a couple are so-so tracks but all the rest are gems. There are numerous memorable hooks with excellent singing/playing and production. It just keeps growing with each listen.

Trust me. Get it.

Since I first heard 'The Cutter', I considered Echo & the Bunnymen's strong suit to be their sense of melody. This album is a wonderful development of that quality. Will's guitar genius is as an enveloping palate of sounds, and his craft has never been finer. Ian's resonance and tone is also perfectly developed in this collection of very memorable tunes. I have been fortunate to have seen them ('88) and while some bands re-emerging from hiatus try to sound like the genre-du-jour, E&tB have succeeded in perfecting what made them rise above merely trendy in the first place.