With a perfectly blended fusion of numerous musical styles and ideas, the Hungarian band Flowʍolꓞ (interview here) elevate consciousness and open the spaces on their debut album Alcohol & Darkness. The infusion of progressive rock, acoustic and psychedelia help to make this particular set a true joy to experience—it’s hard not to bliss out while this is playing.
With themes dealing with substance abuse, isolation and the search for meaning in a chaotic world, Flowʍolꓞ are defying every attempt to pigeonhole them as one thing or another—the best approach is simply to abandon all categories and go with the gut. That said, this 2023 release treats the music with great respect, and sounds fantastic.
Listening to Alcohol & Darkness can result in the feeling of one’s consciousness going into a cosmically vast spin-dizzy state with, interestingly, no chemical or visual stimulation required to generate the effect. That shift of consciousness is certainly an immediate side-effect of this release, caused by the painless move between pyrotechnic instrumentation, drifting musical structures where languid dancing with lighted incense sticks seems called for.
The band comfortably evades pigeonholes by dint of the fact that what begins at the first note is delightfully unlike that which ends with the last note. Remarkably, it all makes sense and there is never a sense of getting lost in the (alcohol, and) darkness.
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Listening to Alcohol & Darkness can result in the feeling of one's consciousness going into a cosmically vast spin-dizzy state with, interestingly, no chemical or visual stimulation required to generate the effect.
