Fredrik : Flora

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/fredrikflora.jpg" alt="Fredrik : Flora" />Perhaps three is the magic number for Fredrik; <i>Flora</i><span style="font-style: normal"> is their most cohesive album to date.</span> ...
Fredrik : Flora
8.5 Kora
2011 

Fredrik : Flora The progression of Fredrik’s music could be attributed to the size of its band members.  A sextet for their debut, Na Na Ni presented the most diversified songwriting of Fredrik’s catalog, as well as being more of a pop than an experimental album.  Reduced to a duo for their second LP, Trilogi (QRO review) acquired intimate and mysterious feel.  As a trio on Flora, the Swedes expand their bedroom sound to something more fit for an arena – enough to hint Mogwai (QRO live review), if the Scottish post-rockers were less concerned with grandeur – and a trace of Panda Bear (QRO album review), if Noah Lennox was more focused on the organic ambience over samplings and vocal experimentations.  With the addition of Anna Moberg, who contributes via Poly-800 synthesizer, as well as backing Fredrik Hultin’s vocals with wood nymph-like chimes, Fredrik toy with the expansiveness of Sigur Ros (QRO live review).  For the first time, we can tag ‘electro’ to the Malmö-based band’s singular experimental folk music.  In addition, Flora comes off more powerful with emphasis of Ola Lindfelt’s toms pounding away, whether sounding like a signal that is leading the journey forward or running from its captors.  Perhaps three is the magic number for Fredrik; Flora is their most cohesive album to date.

For an album that clocks in just over 36 minutes, Flora feels more substantial than its actual length, due to its meticulous arrangement of the tracks.  Though Lindefelt denies any concept basis, Fredrik’s third LP plays like a film with a beginning, middle and an end, chronicling a surreal sci-fi fantasy narrative (this is purely the reviewer’s reading out of a number of possible interpretations of Flora).  Though Flora was recorded in the summer, Fredrik has quite a different take on what many consider to be the most cheerful and colorful season of the year.  Suppose if you live in a country where winter is the dominant season, you can’t help carrying its impact yearlong.  But one does not need to have the wintry mindset to see the darker side of summer.  Imagine yourself a size of your thumb – like Thumbelina – for a creature of such a size, summer can be quite treacherous.  What we welcome as flourishing plants that encourage life, becomes an entangling jungle with predators for fairy-sized beings.

The structure of Flora implores to be listened as a whole.  While tracks like "Chrome Cavities", "Rites of Spring", and "Shape and Colour of Things Gone Blind" are marketable as singles, they lose some of their purport as isolated tracks.  Starting with "Ylva" ("she-wolf" in Swedish), Hultin’s falsetto howl permeates like a wounded wolf throughout Flora.  Lindfelt’s tubular glockenspiel cuts through the yowling vocals like a wind chime in a stormy night, while Moberg’s synths envelopes the interplay in a moody atmosphere on the opening track.  "Ylva" transitions seamlessly into the foreboding "Vattenfront" (water front) – the glockenspiel mimics nervous tin soldiers marching in the forest at night, constantly keeping an eye out for eminent dangers.  "Chrome Cavities" has the similar pacing and power of "Vattenfront".  Musically, the more even-paced "Rites of Spring" placed in between the two previous serpentine tracks would have better served the flow of Flora but as it stands, an apt order for an ominous chronicle.  "The Northern Greatern" and "Caleido Calahari" at the middle of the album are instrumentals with pronounced usage of cowbells but not so sure what electrified cookie-jar (as cited in the booklet) sounds like – a creation of Lindefelt, who likes to build his own instruments.  Returning to the saga, "Inventress of Ill (and Everything)" finds Hultin trying to reassure their blurred mission with an understated sorrow, emphasized by his alto horn.  After the bedtime story-favored "Naruto and the End of the Broken Ear" has been told, our characters are experiencing amnesia in "The Shape and Colour of Things Gone Blind".  The album’s fourth instrumental, "I’m Pretty Sure He Said Kildren", serves as a springboard for the elegant closer – the post-apocalyptic "Axis".  The usually detached vocals of Hultin becomes more gentle and empathetic to utter, "soon everyone’s filled / Their heads full of sand / The flag in one hand / A foot on the land / The land is a desert abandoned by animals / The snakes and bugs are depressed / The land is a mess speckled with everlasting ash."  An elegy of unbearable beauty and unexpected solace, "Axis" reminds us our limits in this mysterious universe, mimicking a racing heartbeat as it fades out.

In some alchemic method, Fredrik has managed to transform the pulses, riffs, and thumps into liquefied metallic tapestry, effortlessly meandering among the various aural textures.  May sound chilly at first but you’ll soon warm up to the subconsciously comforting sounds of Flora.  Like a good art house film, there is no definitive resolution at its conclusion, only clues to an outcome for a cerebrally satisfying experience.

You can hear Flora in its entirety on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LPcsMWXIwQg

MP3 Stream: "Inventress of Ill and Everything"

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