- What a difference a tiny change can make. Flowertruck fans beware, the band’s core creative unit -Charles Rushforth and Will Blackburn- have (largely) abandoned their drums and guitars in favour of an MPC 1000 and a MicroKorg and boom, we’re out of Triffids-esque pop-rock and into banging electro. The tunes are still boppy and sweet and Rushforth’s big, generous vocal lunge is an unmistakable continuity, but the clinical beats and sci-fi synthesisers can’t help but make everything else completely different.
Different and thanks to that big ol’ throat that Rushforth’s got, very different to other things out there. I get the comparisons to Suicide and John Maus but did Alan Vega ever bellow that loud? I’ve been scratching my head trying to think of which darkwave demagogue is ballsy enough to make a better parallel, but it’s tough! Maybe that Tom Jonesy weirdo Samuel T. Herring in his Future Islands guise. Or, keeping it local, Julian Hamilton from The Presets?
Interestingly, it’s Rushforth’s performance on what I think is the EP’s weakest cut, Country, which suggests another possibility. Since you’re asking, I don’t much dig the song so much because it makes some really dubiously dissonant choices in its harmonies and just lacks the almost uncanny knack for a pop melody that the pair display elsewhere. You might have sensed it before, but when Charles Rushforth isn’t doing his best David McComb impression out the front of Flowertruck, he can also manage a quite serviceable Peter Garrett. As he sing-shouts his way through the chorus “I am not the one who knows this country” the resemblance is sometimes uncanny.
Across the rest of the EP, that tuneful yelling and the really rather winning electro-pop carry Greenwave Beth to victory. You may well have heard the ear-worms that are the singles Make Up and Love & Property. Those choruses are real fist in the air material “I can make up!!” repeated to infinity, well, hell, you make me want to make up too. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be hearing the EP’s opening cut, Against Me, getting a flogging as well. It’s quietly plaintive in the verses, but, once again, the chorus is a killer and this time it’s the lurid synth warped guitar wailing which will grab you and just never let go.
Flowertruck have developed a very durable following with their sturdy indie-rock-pop, but Greenwave Beth is one side-project that’ll provide very stiff competition. Whether it sounds like Suicide or not, these are electro bangers you can bank on.
- Chris Cobcroft.