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LP version. If Dorian Pimpernel's first album could be seen as the opening of a secret passage, this second record, Flowers Too, is something else entirely: no longer the discovery of a world, but its methodical exploration, its feverish mapping, its deepening down to the underground layers. At a time when contemporary psychedelia seems at a standstill, when ecstasy has lost its effect, when the vast territories of the imagination have been parceled out, signposted, monetized -- they keep digging. And deeper still. Esoteric pop -- the noblest, the most dangerous kind -- is no longer practiced on the surface. It has abandoned the grand avenues to retreat into hidden laboratories, mental back rooms, basements more deeply buried than those of garage, punk, or black metal. It is there that the secret society Dorian Pimpernel has been working for years, with a stubbornness that feels less like a career than a calling. Still operating on the margins of the classic "group of friends starting a band" model, they pursue their strange project: moonshine pop -- the nocturnal, lunatic, sometimes venomous reverse side of Californian sunshine pop. Except that here, the concept is no longer an aesthetic hypothesis -- it is a territory. Each song is at once fragment and totality: autonomous, yet perforated, inhabited by the vertiginous feeling that other rooms, other corridors, exist just next door. The whole forms a labyrinth whose map one may study -- or choose to get lost within. For whether one is a manic exegete or a simple nocturnal wanderer, one thing strikes first: this is pop. Grand melody. Immediate, supple, luminous -- even when it speaks from the shadows. Their influences are still present, but more deeply digested: the learned psychedelia of the '60s, the imagined bridges between Canterbury and Düsseldorf, haunted film scores, rare synthesizers and vintage guitars that populate their studio-cabinet of curiosities. Except that here, none of it is quoted anymore -- it breathes. On the surface, this music seems to come from yesterday. In depth, it is strictly contemporary: ambiguous, shimmering, unstable, vibrant. But also -- and above all -- harmonious, immediate, deliciously toxic, of an almost suspect beauty. The real surprise is that this second album already possesses the density of a mature work. In its themes -- lost illusions, roads leading nowhere, parallel worlds brushed against but never inhabited -- as in its form: no longer merely a proposition, but a fully realized manifesto.
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