Pretty Flowers

There are those certain albums, and everyone’s seen them, where you just take a look at the cover art, and say “ugh...” Pretty Flowers is one such instance. Now, even if this was a DIY effort, which it’s not, maybe I could overlook the fact that the album art is a picture of a mouth with an American flag tongue, the band's name, Pretty Flowers, written with newspaper letter clippings, all inside the border of red and black scribbles printed on a piece of glossy picture paper. The atrocious art pretty much sets the tone for a solid seventeen minutes of awful.

This bland mixture of punk and garage rock is the soundtrack to every kid whose parents gave them a cheap guitar and locked them in the basement. I’d sit here and dissect every possible angle of the EP, and why it’s as bad as it is, but I really don’t think it would even do this justice, so I’ll hit some of the “highlights,” if they can be called that. I can have an appreciation for lo-fi, low budget, or even occasionally low talent if the band is at least capable enough to write a decent tune. This is not the case here, as between the alternating male and female vocals, there’s entire sub-layers of junior high lyrics, bland harmonies, and minimal talent as far as the instrumentation is concerned.

It seems that the band is at least somewhat trying to be tongue-in-cheek with the opener, “Slut,” but with such lines as “Doesn’t have a boyfriend, she’s too busy giving head /…/ she went to a soccer match, showed everyone her snatch,” the band is scraping at the absolute bottom of the proverbial barrel. Things don’t improve anywhere else through the EP, with both vocalists seemingly thinking that if the ABCB rhyme scheme isn’t followed in every verse, the songs will not be any good.

Literally the only variations found in any of these songs is whether the lead in will be bass or guitar driven, because once it’s beyond that point, the verse-chorus-verse formula is strictly adhered to, with both singers giving their off-key versions of a vocal approach. The male singer is the better of the two, though considering the circumstances, I’m not quite sure how much of a compliment that actually is. Things just drone, and drone, with the singer's piss poor inflections drilling painfully into your head. It becomes even worse when they attempt to sing together, further perpetuating the sheer painfulness of their voices.

My grandmother is always complaining to our family about how we don’t use the coasters she leaves around the house when we go there, but Pretty Flowers have solved that issue for me. No longer do I have to be yelled at for my can of Sprite leaving condensation rings on the wooden table at the end of the couch, because simple placement of this album underneath the can will provide the only good usage that it will ever know.