If the gothic and post-punk sounds were largely predicated on an urban vibe, music that suited the faded glamour and electric glare of cold city streets, The House Flies make music in a similar sonic vein but which much better reflects their surroundings. Just take the album’s opener, ‘Goodnight, Goodnight, Lover Dear,’ a song built on raw guitars and heavy sonics but which runs at a genteel pace and has a cinematic sense more in keeping with a rural, midwestern sensibility, music that reflects the big skies and grand vistas that lie beyond their studio window.
Recent single, ‘Lost Literature’ is more driven, more accessibly groovesome, the bass almost funky in nature, the beats full of energy, yet again it is a song soaked in nostalgia, haunted by a sense of its own memories. And if ‘Derelict Crawl’ is a searing scattering of incendiary guitars and battering ram beats set between oases of understatement, ‘Snakes and Toads’ seems to crawl toward the listener on its belly, primal and proud of it.
‘The Glass, The Orchard’ ends on an odd, off-kilter array of drum tattoo and an imploring vocal slowly rising into sheer and shimmering walls of noise.
Sitting somewhere between the sort of dark-wave adventures that Bauhaus used to have and more eclectic, avant-garde art-rock, Lions and Ore is gothic-sounding without being a goth record in the generic sense; it’s a bit too smart for that. It’s big, bombastic, and beautiful, and, as required, can be cinematic and serene, gritty and graceful, heavy and heartfelt.
Punk may have been a short explosive adventure, but its post-punk sibling seems to be its never-ending counterpoint. And right at the cutting edge of that long-lived response, you find The House Flies.
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