100 Reasons why FLOWERS OF ROMANCE is fucking awesome

8. Sounds like it came out next year, for 22 years straight
9.. MB's sprawling roll-the-tape jams somehow condensed into 9 pop songs
10. And they are pop songs, somehow
11. Top of the Pops appearence performing 'Flowers of Romance' : pop song
12. Acoustic drums blatantly looped into short artificial rhythms
13. And the production on those acoustic drums is savage
14. Skipping over the Can influence straight to Czukay's 'Movies'
15. Live instruments blurred besides pre-recordings in a way that blends the two instead of highlighting the 'found sound' = a post-sampling record released in 1981.

ok the PiL "lp didn't do much for me -- "hooks" is too flattering and plain dishonest for those semi-miopic drones like "THIS IS RELIGION" whereas "hello/goodbye" had me spelllbound with both hooks and guitar, so i think of the first album as really just one good song and a whole lot of EP ype activity -- and there was no better example of how jah _couldn't_ play bass at that stage in his career -- i believe levine when he says he basically taught wobble what to do (but it's still too slow and downer-dumb for me)

metal box/2nd ed. got argued recently here, mostly praise, and so quite coincidentally i played "careering" on the radio(easily the best song for both musical and lyrical reasons, a very good song for student(s) (radio) -- and someone rung up noticing that i must have had metal box at the studio and requested "poptunes" -- now why does everybody like _that_ track ? it may well sound like a tight-wire act to many people, but it's really rather repetitive and boring if you ask me (but i played him his request :)

so this album "flowers ..", hasn't got levine on it right ? well i think he is the musical brains of the operation even if he wants to let everyone know about it (and clearly wobble was no Yes fan = equate levine with virtuosity of yes even if he improved on them)

Has got Levine on it - it's his album much more than the 1st two. Levine's nowhere near as good as he thinks he is, Wobble and Lydon deserve a lot more credit for PiL than Levine is prepared to give them.

18. The rhythm section on U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" is a COMPLETE rip-off of "Banging the Door" and boy is it better in the original context!

-- Alex in NYC (vassife...), September 13th, 2003.

OTM! I experienced that on video a few years ago and now everytime anyone even says "Flowers of Romance" I think of that version of the song. Such a heartfelt performance on John's part! And the end of that video is hilarious - these Japanese kids all swarm around him on the street, starstruck, asking for autographs and he looks at the camera and says, motioning to them deadpan, "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles."

I don't think the album is so bad, but for me the problem lies in the fact that "Four Enclosed Walls" & "Banging The Door" dwarf everything else on it.

and I started pounding out the rhythm to "Four Enclosed Walls" and two guys joined in and played over it even though they didn't know what the song was (and they thought I was mimicking a drum machine!). The result sounded a like a twisted cousin of New Order's "Everything Gone Green" sans synthesizer.

Damn, I would have liked to have heard that!

Incidentally I pulled out Comsats' Sleep No More recently. I remember feeling sorry for you Ian in the sense that if you expect anyone here to recommend you something as good as that well...in my opinion you might be waiting forever! To me that one is in a class all by itself. I guess there are other things possibly similar to it, but I just can't seem to sit anything beside it with ease. Deeply entrenched in my psyche, that record.

― milton parker (Jon L), Friday, 13 October 2006 18:54 (seventeen years ago) link