Flop - 'World of Today' (Frontier)

And here the Flop story ends, and it couldn't happen in a more beautiful and fiercely contemplative manner. Actually, if we're talking pure aesthetics of sound, World of Today only slightly pulls back the big, loud hard rock sound of Whenever You're Ready; the grandiose, stadium rock riffage is still here, recorded like a brisk autumn wind, and on this November morning I couldn't think of a more suitable record to listen to while watching the grey sky slowly brighten. World of Today was released after the band broke up, back on the Frontier label, and is a rare album that I prefer to have on CD than vinyl, since it was squeezed onto a white 10" that is mastered terribly. Maybe someday it will get repressed with the extra 2"s that it deserves, but I'm going to have a slow campaign of winning over fans to Team Flop until then, to build the potential market. Oh, capitalism - if there was justice in the world, then every man, woman and child on earth would receive a 12" 180g vinyl pressing of World of Today in their postboxes tomorrow, and together we could start to understand the frustrations and resentments of mankind, collectively. Because this is an album that is very much about the torment of the individual, struggling to acclimate through schooling ('North Mason Middle School'), child-parent relationships ('Eggs and Ash'), post-adolescence ('Of Today'), childbearing ('April Ate Our World'), labour (the brilliantly existential closing cut, 'Two Martians Working', as perfect a coda as could be) and escapism ('Waste of Space'). If this sounds like a bumpy journey, well it's true that World of Today is less accessible than And the Fall of the Mopsqueezer. The only single was the opening cut, 'Act 1, Scene 1' which is a dark, existential rumination on the corporeality of being, and sets the tone for what is to come. There's unmistakeable darkness throughout this record, and you can hear it in Willoughby's voice - it's hitting a slightly higher register, and there's none of the exuberance heard before on songs such as 'The Great Valediction'. That's not to say he underperforms here - in fact, there's still an enthusiasm and joy for music, and exhibit A of that would be the cover of 'Yellow Rainbow' by the Move. This is a remarkable rendering of an already remarkable song, and the 60s acid imagery of the original takes on a malevolent tone with mid 90s guitar production behind it,  and in the context of the rest of this album. Yet throughout, the essential fairytale nature of the song is never lost as Willoughby sings with almost reckless abandon. If I'm making this out to be a dour, miserable trip, then I'm doing a bad job of conveying the pure joy (no pun intended) of World of Today, at least as a listener. The catchy hooks and musicianship are more integrated than ever before, and you get delicate guitar jangle ('Eggs and Ash' is a beauty to listen to with Kurt Bloch's production) and shifting time signatures ('Of Today'), as well as some of the most earworm-forming (albeit dark) lyrics imaginable. Imagine a fifteen year old version of me singing 'You'll get more disillusioned with age ... you wait!' alone in my bedroom. (In case you're wondering, he was right, I did. We all do, which is one of the lessons of World of Today). This record represents the peak of Willoughby's songwriting in Flop, and some of the most personal moments that I've discerned from his work.  Hell, it represents the peak of songwriting in general, from just about anyone. It's hard to pick a single highlight but maybe it's the penultimate track, 'Miniaturize', which begins with a masterfully epic jangly buildup before it's autobiographical raison d'être is delivered with such mastery that I wish stadiums and arenas were filled with thousands singing along: 'Solemn as a child / in stoic reticence'. The melodic high point may be the back-to-back punch of 'Around' and 'We've All Seen Better Days', the latter being one of the moments of relief and empathy that comes here. I  can only wonder about the residue of failed relationships here, as well as a general questioning of one's purpose in life. That this came out of the Sony-catalysed bad juju makes sense, and if it's a band falling apart then it's channeled through one man questioning everything. I meant to post this a few days ago but once I started listening to it I kept listening to it over and over, so I've listened to this about ten times in the past week and just want more, and I've been listening to it consistently since 1995. I've never met another Flop fan in person, and only a few people who remember them at all; certainly no one whose life was so affected by this record as a teenager. I realise that there's a lot of great records that had I invested my formative years into them might have impacted me as much as this one, but I'm glad I ended up with this one being so important.

Flop - 'Whenever You're Ready' (Sony 550/Frontier)

Are you ready for a hot take? Here goes: Rusty Willoughby is one of the greatest unheralded songwriters currently alive, and his best work stands up against the best work by Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Roy Harper or anyone else you might want to put in that canon. And that best work, for me, falls squarely within the boundaries of the three albums recorded by Flop in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately I only have And the Fall of the Mopsqueezer on cassette, which lies outside of the purview of this blogging project, so we must start here with their major label debut-swansong, Whenever You're Ready. The story of Flop, whenever it is written, which is rarely, is always the same - being from Seattle, they got signed to a major label in another case of right-place-right-time syndrome, this being one of the more crippling examples. They recorded this stunner of a second album for Sony, but because the major majorly fucked them around w/r/t promotion and marketing and general support (Steve Albini is always right!), the band collapsed in a mess of bad vibes and their third album, originally meant for Sony, went back to their first label, Frontier. We'll get there soon enough – oh, hooray for it being Flop Day on this blog! Willoughby's previous and future band was Pure Joy, who are also great, and fell somewhere in-between the Paisley Underground sound of Rain Parade/Game Theory and the crunchier melodic punk of Fastbacks (for whom he briefly played drums). For Flop, he brought in Bill Campbell on second guitar and the sound thickened immediately, especially on this record - er, sorry, CD. Campbell's guitar lines do a lot of chugga-chugga and pickslides and things that you hear on metal records, though it's not metal in the slightest; but it's hardly soft rock either, despite the acoustics of 'Parts I & II' or the psychedelic residue throughout. Generally, the production here is thick and booming, which is evident from the kicking drums on the opening 0:01 of the disc; one would situate this closer to the 'hard rock' genre than pop-punk were it not for Willoughby's angelic, soaring voice and the incredible hooks in his songs. Instead, Flop ends up in a maligned liminal zone which was doomed, even for the time; too heavy for radio play, too brainy for the heavy scene. But the songs are sophisticated, sometimes beyond belief;  that opening cut ('A. Wylie') is about An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw, so that indicates from the get-go that this is a far cry from whatever Mudhoney and Tad were writing about at this time. Second cut 'Regrets' mixes beautiful poetics ('And the leaves are convalescing / the sun is warming the baby seed') with verses of urban alienation over palm-muted heavy rhythm guitar. Willoughby's lyrics often implicate scientific/medical imagery (though more so on the later Pure Joy recordings) and mix in just enough pop culture references to conjure songworlds that are relatable while just ambiguous enough to create intrigue. A cursory listen may suggest this is merely a competent punk-pop album, a product of its time, but it's so much more. And maybe the competing tendencies of Willoughby and Campbell make the music so much more interesting; the sinewy guitar lead underneath the driving speed of 'Eat' gives it a catchy, clear direction; the production of 'A Fixed Point' makes it sound like if 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' needed its batteries changed; the back-to-back punch of 'Night of the Hunter' and 'Port Angeles' is an experience of pop perfection. The former has some of the most clever and quotable lyrics of Willoughby's career ('Solvents, glue and heroin/ she said "I don't want to do that at all" - and it's a song about the Robert Mitchum movie through and through!) and the latter explodes family tension with religious imagery. Legendary UK producer Martin Rushent engineered this and for me, as a 15 year old, I didn't initially glom onto Whenever You're Ready as quickly as the other two records, maybe because the production felt so heavy. But now I can't imagine this any other way. There's hardly anyone around who remembers Flop and probably even less as passionate about them as I am, but I urge you to investigate these three records, because for over 20 years they've been  endlessly rewarding and get better with age. The same can't really be said for the weirdly retro artwork, though again, I can't imagine this record looking any different by this point in my life - a life that has been mostly lived with Flop as some part of it.