It’s hard to sound like you’re an indie band from 2016 – even if you actually are one. London trio Flowers certainly don’t make eluding the spectre of bygone guitar parts look easy. Their second album – the follow-up to 2013’s Do What You Want To, It’s What You Should Do – is a record that seems excessively retrogressive. That’s not just a result of its musical components – frontwoman Rachel Kennedy’s high, clear, almost choral register, which calls to mind Kirsty MacColl and the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser; the twee, jangly and sometimes faintly grungy guitars – but the overall sense of stable, controlled comfort that together they create. C86-style indie was always an anodyne genre, but considering it’s also the soundtrack to the nostalgia-generating, benign-seeming latter years of the 20th century, recreating it feels like niceness squared, and slightly sickly. Flowers might pay tribute with a sound that’s appealing, but they exist in a world of hindsight that isn’t.
