#panic blooms

Wavering keys, high-pitched synths, hazy beats and Fec’s breathiest use of vocoder to date create Panic Blooms’ wandering, mournful world. Left alone, the album blurs and clouds together; without close attention, the songs can easily slide into a single, undulating unit. The sound isn’t exactly monotonal, but neither do any of the 16 tracks separate much instrumentally. Certainly, hearing “Aerosol Weather” in isolation, with its warm, bouncing riff, persistent drums and affected cymbal bursts, might signal a departure from the dreamy morass, but, taken in context, the song is merely a slope, rising over the rim of the album’s trough. Gone are the spurts of aggression that haunted the band’s past. The flare-ups and queasy violence that infused everything from the music to the grotesque cover art have been replaced by something that, while still haunting, is softer, fatigued and intimate. Where in the past, Fec and company might’ve turned the belligerence up several notches for the climax of the blinking, fuzzy “We Might Come Back”, the track is basically left to breathe. This sense of resignation is stark throughout Panic Blooms, particularly on the slim instrumental “To the Beat of a Creeper.” The track initially languishes in soft static and pitch-bending acoustic guitar plucks, ending abruptly just as an ascending synth line seems poised to bring the music, and its creator, back to life.  

With a sparser sound, Fec’s subdued vocals are illuminated. The cliche “quietly devastating” is appropriate. Track 15, “Sunset Curses” is particularly despondent. When Fec’s glitchy voice floats over a pining series of synthetic string approximations, you can practically hear him sigh as he admits, seemingly to himself, that when “the sun goes down, the bad shit wins.” The title track too, finds ruin in the dark. Nocturnal car trouble, real or metaphorical, evokes an oppressive, recurring nostalgia. It would be difficult to come up with a more Black Moth Super Rainbow couplet than “Your mouth is bleeding out / from a razor blade in a tangerine,” but “I feel you hauntin’ me every other year on my birthday” cuts to the real sentiment: no matter the frequency, grief can be a chronic condition. From its title alone, Panic Blooms’ closer, “Mr No One,” wouldn’t seem to offer much absolution. However, “should get a little more sunshine / should get a little less haze, around me,” offers a hopeful rejoinder to the album’s bleak waywardness.  

Fec’s output has always been heady, but, beginning with his group’s last full-length, 2012’s Cobra Juicy, the music and lyrics have lately taken a wistful turn: more strained, less nightmarish, even openly romantic. Where on earlier releases Black Moth Super Rainbow seemed to be the gleeful expression of a twisted, sun-baked parallel world, the last two albums sound increasingly burned out on it. Panic Blooms, rather than reaching for the sticky pop highs of its predecessor, sounds like a purer expression of this emotional drift.