Review: Puerto Rico Flowers – 7
Puerto Rico Flowers - 7 (2011) [Fan Death] // Grade: A
“PRF is PRF,” Puerto Rico Flowers mastermind (and ex-Clockcleaner) John Sharkey III said in a recent interview with Vice. “It has nothing to do with the droves of forgettable children and their synthesizers.” He echoed the sentiment in an upcoming interview with the Bloglin: “I always enjoyed goth music…but I wouldn’t exactly paint PRF stuff completely into the goth corner. I rip off a lot of other shit that has nothing to do with that scene. Unless you count Warren Zevon as a goth band, it’s a little harder to quantify.”
These distinctions — confusing though they may be to someone only vaguely familiar with the band’s bass-heavy panic gloom — are crucial to understanding not just 7 but PRF as a whole. They are not trend-hoppers, trend-setters, darkwave purists, coldwave revivalists, Peter Murphy obsessives or Sisters of Mercy fanatics. They don’t angle for a particularly modern sound. They are not, self-consciously at least, a goth band.
Which isn’t to say they don’t sound like one. They do, in well-timed pockets, with that melodic and ever-present synth, those insistent tom thumps, the whole hot-gray atmosphere of it. I mean, this debut full-length, like last year’s 4 EP before it, is as dark and feverish as they come. But what makes it special are the things simmering beneath: PRF plays to catchy melodrama the way 90s alternative did, the way Glen Danzig did, the way Morrissey still does. The crunchy dirge of “Burning Down Your House;” the opening shrieks on “The Pain Comes Slowly;” that so-regretful lullabye of “After the Weekend,” all of them overlaid with Sharkey’s cascading baritone croon — these songs aren’t dark because PRF forced them to be. They just are.
And that’s what makes the band memorable in a world of Sharkey’s so-called “forgettable children.” You don’t hear 7 as an intentional homage to anything in particular; it’s simply what happened when he sat down, years of influences and ideas and experience in tow, to write a new record. You can try pinning it to one reference, one genre, one period of time, but it’ll slip through your fingers like so much water; 7 escapes simple categorization. It’s a hellish-melodic, midnight-terrified, desperate gasp of an album. Despite what came before it. Despite what stands next to it. PRF is just PRF.
Puerto Rico Flowers – 7 by Fan Death Records
