FLESH WORLD - Into The Shroud LP

Highly recommended.

Flesh World’s fifth release and sophomore album, and their first for Dark Entries Records. Each of these songs speak to a chaotic or sometimes eclectic period of influence of different books, ideas, drawings, saints, stories, and aims gathered in the two year writing process since the previous album.

Themes of this record include writer, advice columnist, and Dreamland actress Cookie Mueller, the youth's effect on the general political psychosis of nostalgia​, icon ​Billy Fury, and the writings and drawings of Jean Cocteau as a hovering guide for living with less rules. The record is a topological map showing the cities of the Bay Area and Los Angeles in rapid change, looking to the books, records, and artists paid study to in order to create continuity in the constant flux of the city, the punk show, the gay world, and the rest of the environments Flesh World insulate themselves in for survival.

The group’s dynamic has greatly ​solidified on this album ​with​ a brilliant new rhythm section​. Flesh World find it easy to be influenced by a range of musicians from the guitar flourishes of Alan Rankine of the Associates​​, the swinging notes Johnny Marr of the Smiths, to the romantically desperate vibe of Roland S​.​ Howard and Nikki Sudden, to the razor thin vocals of Jenny Ross from Section 25, the androgynous vocals of Roy Orbison, to the structured synths of ​OMD.

Imagine bodied guitar hooks blending into desaturated pop vocals, injections of synthesizer melodies and anxious drum builds, peaking into a pure punk-driven dream.