If ever there was an album that sounded like a slide reel of vaguely familiar, faded portraits of people you used to know at places where they used to be found, it would be Tourist Language by Flowertown. The second LP (if you don't count their 2020 self-titled compilation) from the SanFan duo arrives like a whisper in a dream, or a dusty old 45 that you can only hear when you close your eyes. It's like a minor storm cloud on the ceiling that keeps following you around the house, threatening a 60% probability of dosing you with a downpour of sober epiphanies. Karina Gill and Michael Ramos's interchanging, and often intertwining harmonies, present a hauntingly blissful convergence point between the Velvet's and Nico's mid-century collaborations for modish, melancholy teens and the garage-raiding, sonic cat-burglary of the Ravonettes, while the strumming strain and cobweb-catching grit of their guitarwork and accompanying atmospheric elements have the quality of a lost Guided by Voices tape-demo, which has been languishing in the storage shed of one of the band member's relatives, and whose magnetic strip has become so vandalized over years of being exposed to the elements that its surviving recordings have taken on the quality of ghostly, pitted dreampop revue, like Beach House attempting to persevere through a set in a deluge of acid rain, or Slow Pulp swimming to shore through a slurry of their own decay. If nothing else, Tourist Language represents a lingua franca of interpretative grammar that is your visa to search the fuzzy borders of present possibility as it leaps through the liminal folds of past observation and sensation.
There is a buta load of great records to be found over at Paisley Shirt Records.
