“Feelings tend to drift, don’t you think?” a line goes in the song ‘Theme for June’, off Welcome Strawberry’s 2022 eponymous debut full-length. Three years later, listening to the Oakland group’s sophomore album, Desperate Flower, I suspect that composer and lyricist Cyrus VandenBerghe would now rephrase that question as “Everything and everyone tends to drift, don’t you think?”
Granted, it sounds a lot less poetic, and he knows he’s right regardless of the answer so he’s not actually asking you. Still, it feels as if he and his band have set out to prove that whoever you’re with and whatever surrounds you will one day be gone. Not necessarily in the sense that they’ll perish, but rather because life is made up of ephemeralities: no quality, feeling or experience lasts for long. And neither does scent.
“Scent is the most underrated art form – so much of it is entangled with emotion, mood and memory”, Welcome Strawberry’s Bandcamp page says. Sure enough, the dreamily psychedelic album opener is called ‘Fragrance Net’ and contains the lyric “My body floated like a scent”. But I’d argue that the album has a much broader focus. All the senses are covered; it just so happens that no matter what they encounter or absorb, ultimately, each one fails to hold onto it.
The ten songs on Desperate Flower suggest that, like a dream or a memory, everything is elusive and the band does a great job of crafting the kind of sound that places you somewhere between the real and the imagined. It’s a place for trying to catch a feeling with a net, for being paralyzed by the softness of someone’s breath, for selling air to the ones you love, for feeling threadbare as time wraps around you. The poetic imagery the lyrics evoke should make you see that all there is in life simply comes and goes.
Now, while that may sound like a bleak proposition, the music doesn’t feel cold or desolate. Quite the contrary in fact. The only song I’d describe as melancholy is closer ‘Unraveled Smiles’, probably because VandenBerghe sings in a deeper register than on the other cuts, plus parts of it remind me of The Cure’s early ‘80s records. Other than that, most of Desperate Flower sounds hypnotic, lulling you to sleep or to disappearance – it’s your choice really. But to their credit, Welcome Strawberry manage to keep the music from becoming tedious or repetitive.
To be fair, drawing from styles as diverse as shoegaze, dream pop, psychedelia, experimental noise and lo-fi, the sound was always going to be kaleidoscopic; making sure it stays cohesive throughout the entire album is the real feat. And it does, despite a wide range of tempos from the mellow drift of ‘Fragrance Net’ to the fast-paced ‘Memory Cube’. At times, the guitars jangle like Johnny Marr’s (‘Violets & Honey’) then screech like those of fellow Californian band Whirr on their Distressor EP (‘Like a Tulip’). The vocals are soft and airy by default, but sometimes, like on ‘Simplesyrup’, they shift to barely discernible, or are entirely absent (‘Nursery Loop’).
Such variety is nothing new to Welcome Strawberry, though. Some of their debut album sounds like classic 120 Minutes fare from MTV’s heyday but with more synths, while the 2023 five-track EP Scared to Look, released between the two LPs, offers a bit of punk ferocity, riffs straight from a Helmet banger, and the hazy pop of Beach House. And yet, in spite of being just as eclectic as the band’s previous output, Desperate Flower is a more harmonious collage, pulling their influences together into what feels like a vision. One that will not drift.
Desperate Flower is out on 25th July on à La Carte Records – order now on vinyl and digital download via Bandcamp
Welcome Strawberry: Instagram
Review by Attila Peter
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