Santa Cruz's Scowl are telling you exactly where to plant it on their debut LP, How Flowers Grow. They're not leaving any stone unturned in the garden of angst from which they spring. Inspired by '90s alternative rock and the hardcore bands they've come up playing shows within Southern California, the band sounds incredibly tight on this album, with a tense, melodic undertow that emerges and blossoms in full on the mid-album highlight "Seeds to Sow."
How Flowers Grow melo-core though. There are genuine wracking grooves on "Pay Privilege Due" and rope-a-dope chord and vocal combos on "Fuck Around" that will give you a case of hardcore road-rash in a Terror and Negative Approach kind of way. While tracks like "Roots" and "Trophy Hunter" have a threatening, tetanus-lined, metallic hardcore varnish of rust and dried blood.
But through their vicious exterior protrudes a vindication of vulnerability. A facet of the band that is evident even when they are fully baring their fangs and thorns. This aspect of their sound is observable not only in the way that the band presents and packages their albums- wiggly hand-drawn images of flowers, painted in soft pastels- but also in their lyrics.
Most of what singer Kat Moss is saying is audible and nearly all of its content speaks to a need to break out of the intolerable confinements of common, ordinary, and everyday drudgery. Through her gruff vocal presentation, the band speaks to the need to demand something more from life and the necessity to provide space for others to do the same- whether that be the abolishment of expectations of gender performance, a pushing back on demands for reducing expectations of what one is capable of in their own life, or the quiet tyranny of shift work that you only do for pay, and not for the benefit of yourself or for a community.
When meditating on Scowl's message, the lyrics of "Idle Roaring Room" echo within my mind- a song that collapses the feeling of isolation that can surface in a crowded room- where Kat barks and snarls the line "Listen to yourself!" as a challenge and a reminder to fight for the space and the light you need to grow, with the heavy implication, that in doing so, can inspire (and conspire with) others to do the same.
As good as How Flowers Grow is, it feels like only the starting point of Scowl's evolution, and it will be a delight to see what radical formation that morphs into next.
