In Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” the main character asserts “that it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely.” I don’t know that I agree entirely, but when it comes to the emotional Holocaust of a break-up album like Former Ghost’s “Fleurs,” it’s probably best to keep yourself a few feet away from total identification with the despair on display.
Former Ghosts started out as the solo project of Freddy Ruppert. He had no intention to release music after retiring his This Song is a Mess But So Am I moniker, but then heartache took a big old messy shit everywhere.
After a rather devastating break-up, he began to work on this collection of emotionally distressing songs that detail the sort of overwrought emotions we all have when forcibly becoming single. Initially conceived as little more than an artistic break-up mixtape, Ruppert pulled his project into a band consisting of himself, Nika Roza (Zola Jesus) and Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu).
On “Fleurs,” the band manages to rescue overwrought break-up despair from emo music and Bright Eyes and return it rightfully to the throne of Joy Division’s late vocalist Ian Curtis. To be honest, telling someone you are near suicidal over your heartache only works if you’ve got the true ability to pack some heavy weight behind it.
Emotionally, this album lives up by being heavy as fuck — layers of reverb that supposedly play for seven full years when strung together, noisy abrasions tearing into your soul and vocal range that can truly express the overpowering immensity of sadness.
The album closes with one of the most obliterating triple punches I’ve heard in the past few years. Roza leads the band through “The Bull and the Ram,” a blistering call for honesty in the end of a relationship with calls of “Tell me the truth” eventually erupting in “Speak louder, damn your heart.” Ruppert follows with “Hello Again,” a please-just-wait tear-jerker that eventually gives way to the final track, “This is My Last Goodbye.”
The final track is a true emotional trainwreck that, on paper, looks like little more than middle-school goth poetry. Ruppert chokes out, “It’s ok, everything dies,” only to give way to Roza’s repeated coda of “Who is going to love you like I love you?” Yeah, it sounds a little overly hysterical, but the performers manage to capture us when we actually do say these things in that moment when being nuanced has totally escaped us.
So, what does it mean to completely enjoy the album? Ruppert, recently entirely separated from the female who inspired the album, just sprung out on tour to sing about the exact emotions every night. His wanderings have been covered by bandmate Jamie Stewart for the sex and entertainment blog Nerve.
So far, Ruppert has managed to lay on a bartender’s “puss puss” while tequila is poured on his face, have sex in a car outside of a waffle house, mail a copy of the album to his ex, puke on a stripper mid-lapdance and realize that “the solution to pain is drugs.”
The band hits San Luis Obispo on Oct. 30. They will be playing at the SLO Art Center with Magic Fingers and Secret Tones.