Bad Flamingo’s Post-Apocalyptic Noir Americana “Oh My My” is a Timeless Love Song for a Cormac McCarthy-esque Future

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Bad Flamingo always seems to make changes to its sound and style with every single and “Oh My My” is like an early Americana and country song in its spareness of composition. Also kudos on having a great new photo with a signature style with every single. Other bands take note. The song has the kind of production you couldn’t have done quite the same a hundred years ago and yet the way the song is arranged and performed it’s elements could have come together before the advent of electric instruments and modern production methods. It’s yet another chapter in what seems to be the story arc of two rebels on the run from a stultified mainstream society. But this time there’s a sense that the duo are running from a world in the late stage of an empire and not depending the dubious comforts of what passes for civilization. The opening line “It’s desert on all three sides” sets the stage for a song filled with nice touches of tactile detail like “I stood up on the table, threw one back and peeled the label” and “I dance with the devil under the neon.” Musically it recalls Neil Young’s “Ohio” and “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac at the same time and that sense of camaraderie in a time of troubles. The percussion provides as much texture as rhythm, hushed vocals convey the intimate energy of the lyrics and experiences shared by partners and the guitar and banjo combination give a sense of timelessness by evoking the past and the future at once. Listen to “Oh My My” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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The Dark Romance of Bad Flamingo’s Folk Rock Noir “Mountain Road” is Pure Laurel Canyon Gothic

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It’s tempting to call Bad Flamingo’s recent run of singles, and really much of its earlier output, Laurel Canyon Gothic. “Mountain Road” is crafted from delicately intricate folk rock style guitar work, strings and near whispered vocals and one hears in its sonic DNA the sensibilities and musical spirit Donovan absorbed from West Coast bands in the USA in the mid 60s before writing his own interpretation of that collective sound on his 1966 album Sunshine Superman. There are the ghosts of “Season of the Witch” haunting “Mountain Road.” But Bad Flamingo’s song seems to be another one about a partnership on the run from the enervating tendrils of mainstream society and fueled by personal myths and narratives and the romance of how the adventure of it all is exciting and the secret greatness shared between two people except that it’s precarious and the lifestyle doomed in the end. It’s a twenty-first century noir like a darker early Gordon Lightfoot song and yet another fine example of the duo’s unique and consistently engaging songwriting. Listen to “Mountain Road” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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Bad Flamingo’s “Keep Off of You” is a Late Night Honky Tonk Mantra Against Your Habits of Attraction to Someone Bad For You

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Bad Flamingo strips its sound back even further back than it has for a whole on “Keep Off of You.” The spare acoustic guitar, perhaps banjo, with some touch of fuzzy electric guitar and a hint of synth accented by the barest percussion has rarely sounded quite this minimal. And the vocals are not a whisper but certainly like the voice in your head as you’re writing something in a journal when you’re feeling foolish for letting yourself be duped again by someone for whom you have given into your weakness to indulge some time that ended up being a hurtful waste of your minutes and hours. The lyrics are like a set of honky tonk mantras against giving in to your impulses and instincts to the kind of animal appeal and attraction to someone that’s bad for you and in just over three minutes of these reminders you hope that our narrator is finally able to get that fool out of her system. Listen to “Keep Off of You” on Spotify and follow the great country/folk/weirdness of Bad Flamingo at the links provided.

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Bad Flamingo’s “Devil and the Deep Blue” Channels Private Anxiety Into Moodily Transformative Americana Art Rock

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Bad Flamingo has crafted a typically unpredictable song with “Devil and the Deep Blue” beginning with a brooding bass line lead and the most minimal of guitar accents. Then the vocals come in sounding very focused within a narrow yet expressive range compared to some of the duo’s songs of years past but within the style of its more recent songs. It just makes it feel like the words are being given to us in confidence with a direct focus. Later in the song acoustic guitar and electric come in to give some sonic shading and detail with the electric ringing out like a briefly echoing thunderclap before the song returns to its simple, rhythmic elements that are more percussive than melodic giving the song a bit of a 1980s Tom Waits flavor circa the weirder end of Swordfishtrombones. It shouldn’t work but it does and breaks standard songwriting forms. At times the song is reminiscent of the sort of thing Barry Adamson was doing on his 1996 opus Oedipus Schmoedipus through inverting jazz tropes to make something that sounds like it isn’t beholden to anyone else’s established style while remaining accessible and with a vibe of hushed immediacy. The song seems to be about one of anxiety and urgency but coping through channeling the nervous energy away in almost tribal, ritualistic rhythms. Listen to “Devil and the Deep Blue” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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Bad Flamingo Tread Close to the Edge of a Good Time on the Fringe of Its Expiration Date on “Fiddle”

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It’s really astonishing how Bad Flamingo delivers such stylistic diversity across its prolific songwriting career. Always inventive, always incisive and creative lyrics. And “Fiddle” is no exception. Employing a simple acoustic guitar riff and narrowly executed vocals like a Laurel Canyon era song but written by Gordon Lightfoot it’s a song about opening oneself up to someone who isn’t so good for your life but who has an appeal that gets past your defenses and for a time you indulge their trespasses because there’s something about their energy you find enjoyable for the moment. The chorus lines with “right now just play me like a fiddle” suggest there is a complicity in and awareness of the manipulation to which one is allowing into your sphere but no guilt because “I wanna pin your clothes on the line, I want to pin your body under mine.” Our narrator of this story song is getting something she wants out of the situation and is willing to put up with nonsense until she’s through with it. We find out in lyric “giving you my hands, finger the middle,” surely a deft and creative turn of phrase, that even in the acceptance is a willingness to drop a fool when the time to move on arrives. Listen to “Fiddle” on Spotify and follow the talented duo of Bad Flamingo at the links provided.

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Bad Flamingo Speak to a Sudden and Vulnerable Awareness of Mortality and the Preciousness of Life on “I Won’t Let You Die Young”

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The creepy guitar squiggle at the beginning of “I Won’t Let You Die Young” finds Bad Flamingo employing another effective method in complementing its imaginative songwriting. Throughout the song that sound like if a sleepy frog was an instrument isn’t overused, it just serves to let the ghostly other guitar work shimmer out more vividly and the melancholic vocals to glider over the song even though they sound particularly intimate with the sound of a toy xylophone struck to add a nice touch of delicacy for a song about mortality and feeling that so acutely and wishing a long life for a loved one. The way the twin vocals harmonize captures a vulnerability that’s palpable and sounds like it comes from a place of knowing too well and too often what it’s like to lose important people in your life too soon and yes entirely too young and the ache that can revisit you suddenly and put you in a place where you feel it all over again. It could be a bummer but there’s something reassuring about remembering that connection and the immediacy and unguarded moments that feel like life shared in the present tense. Listen to “I Won’t Let You Die Young” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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Bad Flamingo Adopts a Zen-like Composure in the Face of Everyday Chaos on “Rolling Around In It”

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There’s something about Bad Flamingo’s “Rolling Around In It” that sounds like something you’d hear in the opening sequence of an animated film version of a Daniel Clowes graphic novel. The eccentric elements of sound from the use of instrumentation in the guitar and bass and almost Bossa Nova rhythms in minimalist arrangements coming together in peak moments and quickly dissolving into the background to accent and frame a series of images in the lyrics that seem to follow a symbolic dream logic. Words about how a cold glass of water will turn someone into mud, the chorus of “a seven a seven a cherry a cherry a cherry a pit” suggesting the outcome on an unusual slot machine, a lighting rod that can actually be surprised it got struck. Is that really what we’re hearing? What does it all mean? That everyone and everything has unexpected vulnerabilities and outcomes and best to take a Zen approach to this built in element of chaos in a world of complex dynamic intersections? Who can say but this song that comes off like one of Suzanne Vega’s more idiosyncratic and meditative pop compositions but even weirder has an undeniable hook like much of the output of Bad Flamingo. Listen to “Rolling Around In It” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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Bad Flamingo Sketches the Attraction of Rebellion Against Restrictive Culture Mores on “Bad Apple”

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Bad Flamingo’s single “Bad Apple” sounds like a bit of blues folklore told accompanied by percussive banjo, slide guitar flares, acoustic guitar strum accents and a touch of synth. Like a soundtrack to a tale of someone who has spent entirely too much of their life doing what’s good and proper only to find out whatever defines those things in a conventional sense aren’t very psychically satisfying. So she years to be lead astray, as it were, by someone who other people say is the proverbial bad apple. But as in real life this person’s life represents liberation from an internalized oppressive culture rather than genuinely a bad person but as anyone born to rebel against the status quo what that person represents is an element of danger too as when you learn that you have so many more options in life you don’t want to go back into the cultural corral. At times it’s reminiscent of a Kimya Dawson song or Garfunkel and Oates but without the comedy and more emphasis on the surreal and freely associating and subverting cultural myths. Listen to “Bad Apple” on Soundcloud and connect with Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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Behold Bad Flamingo’s Slinky, Psychedelic Spaghetti Western Song “The House Is on Fire”

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“The House Is on Fire” by Bad Flamingo sounds like something that will be in the inevitable Jim Jarmusch haunted rural town where a secret society of dentists that practice mummification in their “health cult” undergoes a power struggle for the leadership of the group that changes its membership and mission forever. Just plug “dentist mummy cult” into a search engine and have at it. But this song, slinky, spaghetti western psychedelia, downtempo and sensual would fit a montage when the whole thing goes upside down and the final conflict is afoot. Simple guitar accents, soothing vocals and spooky bell tone and synths conspire to give the song a feeling like something out of 60s garage rock and Peggy Lee’s weirder songs. Listen to “The House Is on Fire” on Soundcloud and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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