Staff Reviews

Flesh World - Into the Shroud

Review by Billy Campbell

The last time I was sat in the red and white, guilt-infested, clinically lit-up world of a Tennessee Chicken at 4am, reflecting on»

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Flesh World is a dream punk group formed in the summer of 2012 in San Francisco. The quartet includes Scott Moore (Guitar, Synths) Jess Scott (Vocals, Guitar) Andrew Luttrell (Bass, Backing Vocals) Sam Lefebvre (Drums). Jess and Scott met while loitering around the Panhandle district, listening to records, gossiping, and playing live shows around town with their bands (Scott plays in hardcore group Limp Wrist and Jess played in the indie pop band Brilliant Colors). The pair immediately bonded over a shared love of The Velvets and The Mary Chain. They began writing songs in Scott’s lofted bedroom in the City and took their name from a XXX magazine. The fully formed band released their first self-titled 6-song EP in December 2013 for London punk imprint La VidaEs Un Mus Discos. Two 7” singles were followed by their debut album The Wild Animals In My Life released in 2015 on Iron Lung Records. Into The Shroud is Flesh World’s fifth release and sophomore album, and their first for Dark Entries Records. Each of these songs speak to a chaotic or sometimes eclectic period of influence of different books, ideas, drawings, saints, stories, and aims gathered in the two year writing process since the previous album. Themes of this record include writer, advice columnist, and Dreamland actress Cookie Mueller, the youth's effect on the general political psychosis of nostalgia, icon Billy Fury, and the writings and drawings of Jean Cocteau as a hovering guide for living with less. The record is a topological map showing the cities of the Bay Area and Los Angeles in rapid change, looking to the books, records, and artists paid study to in order to create continuity in the constant flux of the city, the punk show, the gay world, and the rest of the environments Flesh World insulate themselves in for survival. The group’s dynamic has greatly solidified on this album with a brilliant new rhythm section. Flesh World find it easy to be influenced by a range of musicians from the guitar flourishes of Alan Rankine of the Associates, the swinging notes Johnny Marr of the Smiths, to the romantically desperate vibe of Roland S.Howard and Nikki Sudden, to the razor thin vocals of Jenny Ross from Section 25, the androgynous vocals of Roy Orbison, to the structured synths of OMD. Cookie Mueller seems to be watching over the process; Scott recently saw two art shows in one day in New York; one that was imagined merchandise that would have been produced if John Waters films were marketed to children and the other about AIDS, the common thread was Cookie, whom Jess wrote about in This Great Cheap Face on the current record. Each copy includes a double sided fold-out poster with lyrics, a collage of video stills of the band, and photos pulled from queer literature and arts.
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