Construction by Tomato Flower

Following the release of Tomato Flower’s stand-out future-pop debut, Gold Arc, the Baltimore unit turns their utopian impulse towards the worldly with Construction, a fresh set of densely knotted pop songs. Austyn Wohlers (guitar/keys/vox), Jamison Murphy (guitar/vox), Mike Alfieri (drums), later adding Ruby Mars (bass), meld irresistible melodies with rhythmic trickery, bending genre and palette at will.

Construction refers both to “constructedness,” processes of artifice and social construction, as well as the material activity of building. The music evokes something sculptural, reflecting the painstaking processes of material transformation that create physical objects. “Blue” weaves together economic anxiety with a desire for sublime beauty; “Fancy” considers the ambivalence of desiring success; “Aparecida” imagines a religious vision cut short by having to clock in to work. But for all their literary sensibility and taste for double meanings, Tomato Flower rejects ironic detachment. Feeling is always at the center of the songs, even when the feeling morphs and evades; “Bug” is simultaneously vulnerable and threatening, and “Taking My Time” moves from a plaintive love song to a joyous prophecy. Construction shows a band with a distinctive approach and a deep archive from which they reveal only the brightest and most confounding of pieces.

The band recorded Construction over fall of 2019 into winter of 2021 in the same time frame as their debut, Gold Arc. Much of the music came together in the peak days of COVID isolation during long days on the top floor of Austyn and Jamison’s rowhouse, overlooking aging Baltimore architecture. As a group of self-professed psychedelic nerds, the band used this time of uncertainty to stretch the limits of both study and play. The process of composing Construction combined a spirit of academic rigor and intense experimentation as they holed up and crafted pristine jewels of rock music.

For Tomato Flower, stylistic synthesis through the process of songwriting is foundational to the project of genuinely modern pop music. The band’s nuance is achieved by expanding the rhythmic and harmonic palette of a rock band while maintaining the strictness of pop songwriting and its insistence on melody. Perhaps the farthest out from the band’s usual template is “Fancy,” an extended, meditative song with shades of slowcore and shoegaze while “Bug” is perhaps the archetypal Tomato Flower song; its dense, often dissonant guitar interplay, sharp emotional shifts, and jazzy chord qualities are guided by Wohlers’s intimate lead vocal. “Blue” moves from jerky guitar riffs to an ambient outro, reflecting the band members’ shared interest in more textual, expansive types of music. “Taking My Time” sits tautly between post-punk and Bacharach-style pop music before soaring into an angelic bed of harmony; the heavenly firmament as seen through the beams of the construction site.

Construction marks the end of the first phase of Tomato Flower and the beginning of a new phase. Regrouped in Baltimore as a four-piece, they are currently working on their first full-length and playing shows up and down the East Coast and beyond.

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