The Garbage and the Flowers

Sydney via New Zealand outfit The Garbage and the Flowers are a respected three-piece renowned for their instinctual grasp of soulful, emotive rock music, of the sort that wantonly eschews prominent focus on melody in favour of a noisier, more elemental inclination towards sound. It’s a path that New Zealand has notoriously chiselled for the global underground for more than twenty years: the Dead C, Alastair Galbraith (who champions this band), even the relatively innocent Flying Nun luminaries like the Clean laid foundations. I can vouch for Garbage and the Flowers being fairly decent when I saw them about twelve months ago – maybe awesome – the way they’d ride lethargic, dissonant chords until the sepia chopstick snare-hits would map some kind of vague musical narrative. They were structurally difficult but immediately affecting, and their migration to Australia, and the loss of their original drummer Torben Tilly, hadn’t appeared to hamper their appeal.

But tonight was a disappointment. In the scarce, intimate warehouse environment, the band’s body language was painful to observe. It appeared at times that the members were cringing at the bestial, impenetrable, discordant soup they were emitting, and all evidence suggested that the band had not gathered, convened, conversed, or considered their collective craft for a very long time. The simplest rhythmic to-and-fros were fractured by sheer sloppiness, to the extent that an audience had no chance to grasp a bearing on what the band were even attempting to achieve. Yuri Frusin’s guitar didn’t ring affectively between notes like it once did, Helen Johnstone’s viola was inaudible, and Stu Olsen’s drums seemed to puncture when they ought to have drifted. It’s like their usual dynamism was all tangled up.

There’s a lot to be said for pop music that tenaciously wanders the gulf between harmony and noise and manages to effectively conciliate the two, and Garbage and the Flowers are normally a striking example of such a mixture’s success. While convinced tonight was an ‘off’ night, and that the band still contains brilliance, it’s difficult to shake off the feeling that this group have rested upon their reputation as a ‘noisy’ band and forgotten how to rein that noise in, to the great detriment of their songs. It may have been that most of the audience were already gone, smoking in the hall, but when Garbage and the Flowers closed their set there was an awful, awkward silence in the room. They are capable of so much more than this, I swear.

by Shaun Prescott