However, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom’s kaleidoscopic radiance and rhythmic verve are ultimately vessels for Ubovich’s darkest thoughts. If psychedelia is a portal to an out-of-body experience, Ubovich is floating away with one eye on the ground below, bracing for the moment when the spell is broken and he crashes back down to earth. While “Silly Cybin” appears as a playful, acoustic-based singalong that matches the spirit of its punny title, there are bad-trip horrors and suicidal ideation cataloged within. But if that song establishes a stark contrast between bliss and psychosis, the cryptically titled “ICNNVR2” completely blurs it: “I carve the crosses right into my arms, in the purple drunken dawn,” Ubovich declares, before he rides straight into an incoming brass-blasted storm, much like another stoner-punk who once tried to assure us he was feelin’ alright in the midst of a raging saxocalypse that suggested otherwise.
If Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom is Ubovich’s attempt to channel negative experiences into positive energy, the album’s searing centerpiece, “Move,” is all the more captivating for its refusal to sugarcoat its bitter sentiments. Cut from the same blood-splattered cloth as Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” or The Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy,” the song’s menacing motorik throb and sinister aura are intensified by Ubovich’s spiteful address to a former confindate (“I can count the reasons/ the reasons we don’t talk”), en route to an extended, echo-drenched descent into madness and furious finale. (The track is seven minutes long, but you can easily imagine Meatbodies stretching it out to twice the length in concert and making it their go-to set-closer till the end of time.)
But while “Move” counts as this album’s most agitated and aggressive outburst, you can sense Ubovich finding strength and resolve in its ugly emotional exorcism—the song is effectively a primal-scream and hypno-therapy session all in one. And that sense of catharsis is ultimately what grounds Meatbodies’ hyper-referential rock in the here and now. Among the requsite thank-yous to friends and famliy, Ubovich’s liner notes for Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom include shout-outs to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Spacemen 3, Iggy Pop, and the 13th Floor Elevators “for changng music” and, presumably, his life. But more than just advertise Ubovich’s influences like patches on a jean jacket, those dedications function as Meatbodies’ pledge to honor their legacies—not by merely making music that sounds like theirs, but by furthering their mission of using primal rock‘n’roll as a pathway to spiritual awakening. And with Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich offers a resounding reaffirmation that psych-rock is forever, even if the escape it provides from our cruel world is ultimately temporary.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
