End of the week. Not much news today other that Disk Union is now accepting orders for Alfie in Japan. That’s good news. I hope Japanese indiepop fans like this release!
Hope you all have a good weekend!
Fanta Panda: I wasn’t aware of this fantastic project by the duo of Frauke from Tripping the Light Fantastic and Mawe N. Klavee from Mikrofisch and The Voltarenes. Their songs are a bit old but so good! Check out “Enya”, what a fun poppy song. Wonder if the Hamburg duo are still making music?
Fleeting Joys: a very nice digital single by this Californian duo. That’s what I found on their Bandcamp. Titled “Everything You’re Running To”, the song has beautiful swirling guitars. On top of this all proceeds will go to the World Central Kitchen, so that’s great. The band is formed by John Loring and Rorika Loring and based in LA as far as I know.
Stephen’s Shore: our favourite friends from Stockholm are releasing a new 12″ on Meritorio Records. It is called “Green” and will include four songs. We can preview two of them, “Ocean’s Calling” and “Carefree Time”, as usual they sound fantastic! A must have! Will be out on April 15.
Ruth Po!: a brand new song, a demo, from Ruth from the mighty Po! It is called “Something Your Wife Doesn’t Know”. Great lyrics, great melodies… and sure it is a bit lo-fi, but that has a lot of charm to me! How talented is Ruth, love all her projects!!
Melk: and last band for this week is Melk from DC. The band formed by Melissa Kain on vocals and guitar, Alex Scheuer on drums and AJ DiGregorio on bass, have a new EP titled “Somebody, Nobody, Anybody”. The first thing that came to mind when listening their songs was Velocity Girl, another band from their area, from back in the day. Tell me if I am wrong? Sounds good!
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Tracing them back to Soundcloud. That’s where I found four songs by Flourish after discovering them on stoneeyedkiller’s Youtube. It seems he has been doing the job I love on Soundcloud, track down 80s obscure indiepop in this fine platform. I guess I need to up my game now, as I shouldn’t just rely on his/her work!
There is some information about the band which is great. We see that they were around 1986 to 1989. They were formerly called Flour and at some point they changed their name to Flourish. Was it in 1986? Or are they counting their time as Four during those 4 or so years?
They were formed by Rob Bulman on vocals, Sean Campbell on guitar, Joel Wirth on bass and Justyn Palmer on drums. They were based in a city I’d love to visit someday, Carlisle.
The songs uploaded are four demos. There is info about each of them, so let’s see…
The first one we encounter is called “Example”. This one was engineered by Alex Warnes at Omega, Cumbria on October 28, 1987. Was it recorded at the same studio? Doesn’t say. It does say that the song belongs to the Carlton Company and Kentmere Publishing though… very professional?
Then we find “Chainsmoker”. There is the same info for this song, so I am assuming they were part of the same demo tape. There is some more details saying that the band considered this song as their “anti-imperialist song” and they introduced it like that at their biggest gig which happened to be at Sands Centre in August 1988.
“When Will I See You Again?” might be my favourite. This one was recorded at Naworth Castle in Cubria in 1988 with Alex Warnes as their engineer. Here they mention that the band used to play often at a venue called Front Page mostly between 1987 and 1988.
“Endlessly Falling Snow” is the last song and was recorded at the same place and time as “When Will I See You Again?”. Most probably part of the same demo.
There is a comment by someone called G A Williams too that mentions that there are more songs by Flourish! I wonder if we will ever hear them! Were they from other demo tapes? Would be good to find out.
Not much more info online. There is this tweet by Jim Wirth, maybe brother of Joel Wirth? He says that there was sort of a competition going on between Flour and Keltic Storm in Carlisle.
And that’s all. Who remembers them?!
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