Flotilla – One Hundred Words for Water – Album Review
Raise your hand if you like thought experiments.
Cool, me too.
Since you are still reading, I’ll take that as consent and keep going with this hook. Imagine we live in a more just and progressive society where anyone can marry anyone else, and Annie Clark and Laetitia Sadier have decided to come together in wedded bliss. Imagine they go on to raise a child together, a lovely daughter, and while she takes Clark’s voice, she eschews the American mommy’s penchant for the hyper-theatrical and pretension for the French mommy’s subtle cool and back-beat proclivities. That little girl, all grown up, would then become the frontwoman of a band of her own, one that would release a record very similar to today’s review subject, Flotilla’s One Hundred Words for Water.
OK – that’s a pretty terrible thought experiment – it violates all sorts of time and space assumptions and, even if it didn’t, is still a pretty ham-fisted hook for getting across my central points: that familiarity with the previous two references will immediately render
Flotilla’s new album accessible and that the band’s vocalist, Veronica Charnley, rightfully deserves to be mentioned in the same conversation as other indie rock luminaries like the ladies commanding the St Vincent and Stereolab operations.
(Side note: I once stood behind Sadier in line at the front desk of the Austin Motel waiting to check out. If I recall, she was buying postcards. I remember thinking about how tall she seemed onstage versus in person.)
As a group, Flotilla is both talented and wise. Each member is more than capable in handling their respective instrumental duties, and you get the vibe they really understand, as a collective, what their act is about. This is a band filled with particularly solid musicians that do a commendable job of comfortably enveloping their singer, who is the clear central focus of the album. The men and women who make up Flotilla know who they are and what they do and go with it – there is no discernible tension between front and back – there doesn’t even seem to be a front and back, but instead great music complementing great vocals.
One Hundred Words for Water starts off with a dark introduction courtesy of the album-opener, “Song for Yannick.” Listening to the lyrics, you wonder what wild beast the singer is referring to as it bides its time and rations its meals. A monster? A ghost? A kidnapping victim? Here’s a hint: the song is really about a kitty, a rather adorable one at that, but don’t let that knowledge interfere with your imagination.
In fact, imagination is the listener’s best friend when it comes to this album. In song after song, Flotilla provides a careful listener with half-complete outlines and sketches of alternative worlds and events, but still leaves plenty of room for interpretation and filling in the rest of the story. For example, “Ghost in a Landscape” reminds me of the dark side of memory, more specifically of the fear one can have of becoming a memory and no longer an active participant in a setting or aspect of life. This song is telling a story about something or, better still, someone, but who and why remain cloaked in mist. Perhaps it is a vague reference to a story about a funeral, or perhaps Alzheimer’s, or even losing a friend for a short while as they serve a stint at rehab. Regardless of the true backstory, the individual in question is gone, and seem to be suffering for it. Or take, as another example, “Ophelia.” While I love the way Charnley croons the phrase “couldn’t be bothered” on this track, even more compelling is the chance to imagine yet another back-story, in this case maybe a failed relationship that, had it not been for the flood the narrator discovers, would have been felt more immediately and painfully but, given the fact that the ground floor of the storyteller’s home was now underwater, she simply “couldn’t be bothered” to be heart-broken, at least not yet. Or, even more vivid, the rare idyllic visuals from an eco-dystopia that might accompany “Old Mill.” Finally, consider “Meet Me Outside,” which I could see as the soundtrack to a loneliness montage in the anti-climactic moment of an independent romantic comedy about a couple where one of the two find themselves in prison.
As wonderfully cryptic and provocative as these song half-tales are, they remain only a part, however important, of broader compositions. Each song on the album deserves to be reckoned with on its own, from the multi-dimensional “Song for Yannick” that first made me think of the aforementioned St Vincent comparison (with the rapid change with organ effects) and Stereolab (in the rushing epilogue, when the reenergizing powers of the subject affix themselves to the narrator’s romance) or the imposing anxiety of “Charlie, I’m Through” with its discordant pairing of perhaps the album’s most upbeat music with its most tense lyrics. It reminds you of those terrible moments in life when you remember that the only thing worse than an uncomfortable confrontation is when one of the participants takes an inappropriately happy tone during it. “Charlie, I’m Through” is the musical equivalent of this exprerience, with its danceable, almost Daft Punk-ian beats that, as you listen more carefully to the words, you probably shouldn’t want to feel like dancing to. Far less tense, but even more complex is “Clouds.” So much so, it strikes me as inappropriate to discuss “Clouds” as a singular entity – in reality, the nearly seven-minute epic is like four different songs, with the most divergent moments being the most technically astute, particularly in the middle period when a lovely interlude transitions into something akin to a techno-lite mini-symphony that is constantly evolving in speed and level, before fading out and being replaced by darling vocals and more mundane accompaniment.
There are so many things I love on this album. The brass effects “Prelude and Epilogue” with the driving guitars underneath, the culminating and overlapping one-woman round in “Charlie, I’m Through,” the cleavage separating the two halves of “Two Boys” with the first half seemingly describing breaking up and the second half as the attempts by the dumper to buck herself up (“they’ll be better off now …”), the breathy “ah ah ahs”and subtly melodious orchestral backing in “Clouds,” the fuzzed rock that begins and ends “Old Mill.” In fact, other than the entirety of “Meet Me Outside,” these moments in “Old Mill” are the ones I’d relish the most should an opportunity to see Flotilla live ever present itself. I could go on, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll leave you with this: buy this album. You’ll love it, too.
Flotilla’s One Hundred Words for Water is currently available for purchase here. Although the band does not currently have announced any plans for extensive touring, our New York readers will have an opportunity to see them play in the city when they hit Fontana’s on November 3rd and The Delancey on November 23rd. (Special note to A&R types: these are a pair of shows you are gonna want to attend. Just sayin’.)
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