So much has happened since we last spoke: Worldpeace DMT, previously the solo project of London’s Leo Fincham, is now a duo with Rowan Miles, Fincham’s collaborative partner on last year’s The Velvet Underground and Rowan. Miles’ other band, the Femcels, released a great debut album, I Have to Get Hotter; I saw them “perform,” aka dance around to a playback of the album, at Vespers—the nightclub, not the new Jackson Boxer restaurant—earlier this year, after a set by an Amy Winehouse impersonator. A few months later, they performed with Charli XCX. Now, Worldpeace and the Femcels are being positioned as the prime emissaries of something called “laptop twee,” although that distinction might overestimate Worldpeace DMT’s relationship to both laptop music and twee music.
Fincham and Miles, in response, have dropped Flowers Powers, a stopgap mixtape seemingly designed to prove that they are not “laptop twee”—implication: flimsy, tossed-off, amateur—but the die-hard ’60s pop obsessives they always said they were. In interviews, Fincham and Miles talk incessantly about the Beatles and the Beach Boys, but even if that influence was present, The Velvet Underground and Rowan more frequently dumpster dived in the landfill of American indie music in the 2010s, meaning the easiest points of comparison were Merriweather Post Pavillion, Grouplove, and Cults.
No score yet, be the first to add.
So, naturally, here’s a jingly cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” that sounds like “Honey Bunny” by Girls and a boisterous, percussive track inspired by the Beatles bonfires that took place after John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment. Flowers Powers kind of hits you over the head with its well-meaning and postmodern approach to reference, which is how you get an opener like “Jesus Jesus,” featuring Fincham doing his best baby J. Spaceman impression, or one like “Surfin’,” which, I guess, represents one man’s struggle between hating club music and also not being able to relate to “Surfin’ USA”: “I don’t wanna go dancing anymore/We should’ve never stopped surfing on the coast,” he sings, his voice processed to sound like a surly adolescent chipmunk. “They really don’t make them like this anymore/I don’t wanna go surfing.”
You could take this as joke music if Fincham wasn’t a genuinely great, inventive producer: The ramshackle gospel of “Jesus Jesus” manages to split the difference between ornate grandiosity and DIY scrappiness, while “When Summer Comes” distills the abject sadness of Spector-era girl-group pop into forlorn bedroom indie, Miles’ vocals tapping into a strain of dejection and resignation that’s hard to capture in a pop song. Questions around whether Miles and Fincham are taking the piss don’t seem to hold water when you actually listen to their music, which is deft and deeply felt even at its most zany. Like many musicians of their generation, they are fundamentally ironic and earnest at the same time.
Flowers Powers, by its very nature, doesn’t contain as much madcap variety as The Velvet Underground and Rowan, but it hardly feels slapdash; like a lot of great mixtapes, this feels like an exercise in proving the band’s taste after a period of increased attention. I doubt that this record provides any hints as to what Stick Around for Tea, their October-scheduled second album, will sound like. It almost certainly won’t sound like “Lonesome,” Fincham’s spare country ballad that closes the record: As Flowers Powers seems designed to convey, Worldpeace DMT are a far less straightforward band than that.
