Nowhere Flower - Heat Dome

Second album and first time vinyl showing for Nowhere Flower, the solo project from Spatulas member, Lila Jarzombek. While Heat Dome carries over the DIY sensibilities of that parent project, sonically we're in somewhat different territory, the lope and sway jangle substituted for something a little more chemically altered and third eye orientated. Deploying an array of distinctly home-recorded keyboards, guitars, fiddles, drum machines and strung-out Kim Gordon-by-way-of-Jim Shepard vocals, there's the sense of an artist falling down the stairs of their own whimsical interests and coming up laughing. Melodies jut out at unusual angles, craggy and unexpected, and songs collapse in and out of themselves, sometimes quite tricky to fully discern in the lo-fi fog, other times, as with the title track, instantly arresting and demanding of repeat plays. The intuitive, first-thought-best-thought feel seems at once both effortless and mystifyingly psychedelic in ways that draw connections with Siltbreeze alumni like Hall of Fame and Un and the current crop of tape-hiss/fogged glass outliers in San Fran (Hospital, Sad Eyed Beatniks++).  Since it took some time for the records to arrive with us, I've sat with the audio for a while now and I've still yet to find the centre of Heat Dome, an LP determinedly situated off-centre and awash with hidden mysteries. You know you're in the right place when no matter how you try, you still can't quite fathom the meaning. Nowhere Flower proves a perfect descriptor.