Winter Flowers

The San Fran folk revivalists in the press are getting all "Oh me, oh my!” about this four-piece band of gentle gentiles, but it’s seriously just jive talkin’. The truth is it just had to be that a band would come along and make a complete mockery of themselves by dressing up in Elizabethan style suits (and one gown) to strum folkie tales of clichéd vagueness and weave predictably plodding lines of substandard interplay. In a word, "cash-in.” Winter Flowers hum and sermonise their asses in polite little circles to spout the obvious peace and love bullshit, step on Belle & Sebastien and Buffalo Springfield’s toes at the same time ("Hey Ho”), blab Springsteen-style about growing your hair and going to the "Country Fair,” pontificate positively about the "End of the War” while it rages on beyond Californian shores… Faking it doesn’t come much more plainly than this, folks. And I do say folks, because Winter Flowers put on all the played out hand-me-down suits — John Fahey’s ("Sixteenth Street Sunset”), Vashti Bunyan’s ("Winter Bird”) — and wear the obvious Incredible String Band/Fairport Convention/Pentangle backline of reference as underclothes. But really they’re just prancing about like fucks, playing broken mirror to their surroundings and regurgitating in vapid, empty kind. Totally lame. Corporate folk hath come again.