Joan of Arc: "Flowers"

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Joan of Arc: "Flowers"

By Will James

Joan of Arc is like a garden of annuals that looks different every time it re-grows. The Chicago band seems to reconstitute itself around singer Tim Kinsella every couple of years, with new lineups, new instrumentation, a common knack for occult complexity and no plan. Whatever album they make is a product of whatever is in the air.

Their last album emerged from a squall. Kinsella had just split with his wife, and 2008’s "Boo Human" was uncharacteristically blunt as it chronicled the stages of grief, setting aside the band's usual smirking cerebralness.

Their next work, "Flowers," set for release by Polyvinyl Records on June 9, patters like the baby steps of the band re-exploring its bizarre past, and feeling around for a fresh way to proceed. Kinsella's lyrics, which crystallized in heartbreak on "Boo Human," have sublimated back into riddles and apparent non-sequiturs. The band that sprouted around him is actually four bands - "Flowers" was recorded over a year in four different sessions and with as many lineups. Some of the players are veterans of Joan of Arc's 12-year career, like Kinsella's brother Mike, who records his own indie records under the name Owen. Others are newcomers.

This "whatever feels good" work ethic too often led the band to fall back into their own exotic comfort zone - even avant-garde can be a crutch. On "Explain Yourselves #2," Kinsella's naked voice, left to its own devices, falls into its familiar patterns like the tide through old cuts in the sand. He's out there uttering a shopping list of Kinsella-isms: "Continuity unravels two by two," "Just snuggle up next to your name to keep you warm." And Joan of Arc will always insist on watering down their work with blipping poemes electronique like "Fasting."

Then there are surprises. The opener, "Fogbow," betrays a new perchance for nature imagery that is the closest thing to a unifying element of "Flowers." It turns out a fogbow is a kind of rainbow; over pattering percussion, the synth melody forms something dewy and twinkling. It starts: "The sea on trial, surprised to find / Its own dark floor the juror." It ends with a chorus that alludes to the aftermath of the events described in "Boo Human" - "Nothing bounces one's step like hitting the bottom."

The members of Joan of Arc have invented, over 12 albums, their own school of guitar playing. On woody acoustics and clean electrics, they finger-pluck mazes and set them winding around each other. Guitars account for the best moments on "Flowers," like when a scintillating lead breaks from "The Garden of Cartoon Exclamations" like a ray of sunlight after Kinsella mumbles a line about vanilla wafers and cheese puffs. And a number of these instrumental pagan folk jams populate the album, like weird summer strolls through some freaky garden.

"Flowers" feels freshest toward the end with "Life Sentence / Twisted Ladder," a bewilderingly straightforward track for which Kinsella even suspends his war on verse-chorus-verse. It amounts to a sloppy pop number out of the nineties - over a pounding snare, bleary lead guitar and bass weave around each other like kids on bicycles. For a moment it almost feels like the missing link between Cap'n Jazz, Kinsella's legendary punk band, and Joan of Arc, his 12-year quest for redefinition. Kinsella sings: "Who put the quotes around your entire life?"

Like life - and like almost every Joan of Arc release - "Flowers" has moments of frustration and moments of simple beauty. And - in what seems like some master plan but we know is really just the band getting lost in the moment of creation - it's the one that makes the other possible.