Nowhere Flower, the solo project of Portland’s Lila Jarzombek, return with their third album (not counting the collabs with Miranda Spatula and David Nein Rodere) in as many years and continue to carve a position for themselves as one of the best new voices in the contemporary American underground. It’s not exactly easy work placing what it is that makes Jarzombek such a compelling writer, her style sitting somewhere between intentionally freeform and enticingly sloppy. The songs are somehow both wrong and entirely right, a haze of lysergic drones, textures, fuzzing guitars and anguished vocals, falling apart and together again like teenager friends just trying to work things out. We might have once labelled this ‘shit gaze’ or ‘freak folk’ and I’d have immediately felt ashamed for doing so. And that’s because there’s also an unusual logic to Jarmobek’s approach that’s deceptively complex and threaded together, where the mistakes and the imperfections are the precise point. Do you know how hard it is to get wrong right? In that sense, Nowhere Flower sit neatly (if such a thing is possible) between the likes of Tower Recordings, Jim Shepard and a lost Xpressway recording, one of those third eye souls that sees the art in the left turn, the unconventional, and through the fogged maze. There’s songs here dedicated to friends lost (namely Mope Grooves; Stevie Pohlman) and, seemingly a world bent off its axis, spinning in the wrong direction. Loss, love, and disorientation seems perfectly expressed by such commitment to the transgressive odd. In short, what a songwriter and what an album, Jarzombek’s best yet. No telling where she’ll go next, but I’m following.
FFO: The Tower Recordings, Jim Shepard, Xpressway, Garbage and the Flowers
