Susanna | Flowers of Evil

Rune Grammofon (2008)
By DEVIN KING  |  November 24, 2008
1.0 1.0 Stars

flower_inside.jpg

Susanna's List of Lights and Buoys was one of my favorite records of 2004; her deep, reverberating voice and the band's glitchy, indie-rock-via-jazz compositions possessed a passive longing — Cat Power without the internalized violence — that was perfectly suited to my own undirected, post-undergrad ennui.

Flowers of Evil — a covers record, though it includes two originals — lacks that power. It begins with a version of Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak," which Susanna changes from a rallying cry into a plaintive dirge. She essays the quiet urgency of Johnny Cash's version of Trent Reznor's "Hurt," wherein the world-weary soldier saddles up for one more destructive attempt at freedom.

Although the sparse piano chords set the right mood, her voice is too angelic to pull off the grief she's trying to suggest; the song is meant to simmer with the singer's ironic distance. Her version becomes a silly game of dress-up: cute but awkward. The rest of the album continues in this vein — Prince, Tom Petty, and even Nico (a singer Susanna actually has something in common with) all get tried on and ultimately misinterpreted.

Related: Various Artists | Money Will Ruin Everything, Elvis Costello | Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, Joyride, More more >
  Topics: CD Reviews , Johnny Cash, Cat Power, Trent Reznor,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY DEVIN KING
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   FATHER MURPHY | ... AND HE TOLD US TO TURN TO THE SUN  |  July 29, 2009
    Harking back to an America where one's own lonely voice was the only radio and a BBQ meant a spit in the middle of the desert, Torino's Father Murphy hide detuned industrial textures within stripped-down, spacy folk instrumentation, like a man in a black hat picking up a bullet-riddled guitar with which to serenade his captives.
  •   SOUNDCARRIERS | HARMONIUM  |  May 27, 2009
    The first album from this Nottingham-based band is California dippy: whispered female/male harmonies, slack flutes, swinging drums, comping Hammond organs, and a bass player who finds basic funk riffs in every progression.
  •   THE MOVING PICTURES  |  May 12, 2009
    If one way that bands tie themselves to the past is through sonic reference — Fleet Foxes calling forth Crosby, Stills and Nash, or Animal Collective channeling the Grateful Dead — then there's been a number of bands who tie themselves to the past through cultural reference.
  •   VARIOUS ARTISTS | OPEN STRINGS: 1920S MIDDLE EASTERN RECORDINGS  |  May 06, 2009
    Over the past year, Honest Jon's has released three compilations culled from more than 150,000 78s of early music from the EMI Hayes Archive: music from 1930s Baghdad, early West African music recorded in Britain, and a more general compilation that moved across country lines and the first half of the 20th century.
  •   PAPERCUTS | YOU CAN HAVE WHAT YOU WANT  |  April 14, 2009
    Hidden under reverb and aggressive analog production, the first sung lyrics on You Can Have What You Want belie what seems to be a cheery record title: "Once we walked in the sunlight three years ago this July."

 See all articles by: DEVIN KING