Cinnamon Sea The Garbage & the Flowers

• 1Eye Know Who You Are04:34
• 2Cinnamon Sea04:40
• 3Red Star02:46
• 4On The Radio05:20
• 5Jacob B03:06
• Total Runtime20:26

Info for Cinnamon Sea

"Cinnamon Sea" is the perfect introduction to one of the most mysterious, ever-morphing underground bands from New Zealand. The Garbage and the Flowers make their long awaited return with another psychedelic masterpiece from the band that gave us 1997's cult dreampop gem 'Eyes Rind As If Beggars'. A hybrid fusion of the Velvets, Elephant 6 and any God-fearing stoned strummers you can think of, with a nod to Charlie Manson’s bedside balladry to boot.

On their return, the band hone their songcraft with tracks like ‘Eye Know Who You Are’, a tantalising piece of Mazzy Star on steroids, a spiralling sonic rumble, that reaches a miasmic high on every hummed chorus. It opens the Pandora’s box of this release, a sleight of ear collection of five songs from this cosmology-observing Australia-based outfit. Tracks like ‘Red Star’ exist in a land where sound levels are destroyed by savage birds. ‘On The Radio’ trips into an untuned lagoon. There’s a quasi-religious zeal to proceedings, a nod to Sterling Morrison’s Velvet strum elsewhere, everything that would have been key to the Elephant 6 conglomerate not so long ago, maybe, if you can even imagine, My Bloody Valentine unplugged.

"Cinnamon Sea" was recorded in an abandoned courthouse in Freyerstown, a ghostly village in Victoria’s Goldfields in Southeast Australia, where you’re more likely to meet giant grey kangaroos bounding on its dusty main street than tottering prospectors these days. It unravels with claustrophobic glee as we traverse the structured climes of exemplary songwriting seasoned with the salt of improvisation. This from a band who previously released an album famously dubbed ‘Stoned Rehearsal’. It closes with the track ‘Jacob B’, a melancholy tale that’s a hybrid of Manson’s troubled tunes and the psychedelic folk songs of Quicksilver’s Dino Valente.

“By some measure Wellington's most brilliant pop band, The Garbage & The Flowers are classic underground rock'n'roll with a hazy ramshackle sound pockmarked by bursts of genius.” (Forced Exposure)

The Garbage & the Flowers

The Garbage & the Flowers
The story of The Garbage and The Flowers, by some measure Wellington’s most brilliant pop band, is equal parts classic underground rock’n’roll and a hazy ramshackle history pockmarked with bursts of genius and stoned rehearsals. Rare is it for any band to garner so much underground acclaim whilst leading such a nebulous existence. A small handful of releases, compilation appearances and few live shows make for a curious stop/start history.

Tension can produce the goods and tension was what watered The Garbage and the Flowers. Yuri Frusin (guitar, songwriting) and Helen Johnstone (viola, vocals, now bass) met in their teens sometime in the 1980s. As Frusin recalls “Helen and I met when we were 16 or 17 and practically one of our first conversations went something like: I want to be in a band, and I want to be in a band too!!”.

Of course, at the time being in a band seemed like an almost unattainable prize. Naming themselves after a line in Leonard Cohens ‘Suzanne’ and taking cues from the Velvet Underground, the band has existed in some shape or form since, with help from Paul Yates, Heath Cozen, Torben Tilly, Rebecca Davies, Kristen Wineera, and Stuart Porter. When asked recently about the group, occasional drummer Tilly offers a particularly apt description of their sound: “What I loved about the music we created is that it sounded like it had come from somewhere faraway, that it had traveled a lot of distance and gathered some dust and debris along the way. That said, despite its unhinged qualities we were never really a noise-band even though some strange and beautiful electromagnetic noise would make it to tape”.

Most of the time it was all deeply rooted in a song. This, of course, is one of the greatest parts of The Garbage & The Flowers charm. They really did seem out there, on their own, absorbed in their own world, dropping gem after gem of fractal noise-pop onto slowly corroding four-track cassettes, willing these songs into existence just long enough to let them catch breath and glide away from the speakers for a few moments, before Frusin and Johnstone would knuckle down and write yet more beautiful melodies for beautiful losers.

This album contains no booklet.