Floral Image’s recently released album Gone Down To Meadowland is a timeless ride through warm psychedelic landscapes that feels modern and nostalgic at the same time. The album feels like it travelled back in time to hang out in the 1960s shopping in Carnaby Street, clubbing at Sibylla’s, travelling with The Beatles to India to hang out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi before hopping a wormhole back to our timeline to spread happiness to our troubled times.
However, in the warmth of their music it’s not all peace and love. The band say, “A lot of themes are anti-establishment commentaries on the state of the modern world. It can feel isolating being bystanders of global concern in sleepy Norfolk, even though it’s easy to slip into a false comfort when you’re surrounded by vast space, natural beauty and friendly folks down the market. Gone Down Meadowland is that egoless escapist fantasy that still can’t escape the world caving in on itself; Norfolk isolationism.”
The album was recorded over 6-weeks in Summer 2024, and you get the feeling that they managed to capture some of that summer sun in the album. Shimmering heat haze, clear blue skies and warm zephyrs are implied. There’s so much sun in this record it could top up your vitamin D if you listen to it in the colder months. Songs ebb and flow on happy shiny beaches and all the sounds seem designed to nuzzle those dopamine-producing parts of the brain. There’s the gelatinous wobble of the guitar on ‘Call Up The Doctor’, the soft bass, tumbling drums, and gentle touch of Spanish guitar on ‘The Score’, and the motorik drive of being fired down fibre optic cables in the superhighway electricity of ‘Tiergarten’ a wig-out track that must be spectacular live.
Gone Down To Meadowland and it’s as warm as the best of Stereolab or Soundcarriers and creates a blissful radiance that lasts long after the album has stopped playing. If anyone brings back the UFO Club from the 1960s then I would expect Floral Image to be the house band.
Floral Image are: Fergus Nolan (vocals, guitars), Jack Warner (vocals, keys), Matt Kennedy (bass guitar), Mitch Forsyth (drums, visuals), & Phil Whitton (guitars, visuals)
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Review by Paul F Cook
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