Public Image Limited
Flowers Of Romance

THE REVIEW

It's hard to say what the sound of nightmares is. It's also difficult to choose the meaning to attribute to the word nightmare. Is the nightmare what we dream about while asleep, with our butts in the air, as we push away the sheets that have become oppressive, or is it what we see while awake or seemingly so, in the flow of this miserable waiting? Such a question is a puzzle on which to spill a little blood while banging our heads against it; one of those questions to which everyone tries, roughly, to give an answer, while someone, whom we might casually call David Lynch, continues to shuffle the cards and to such a question, blissfully, with that owl-like tuft and a light smile, shrugs it off. And so Twin Peaks might not be the ideal place, but it's the perfect non-place where Special Agent Cooper can irreparably live straddling dream and reality, understanding reality only from the dream or leafing through the pages of reality amidst the folds of dreams and the roads of this unchanged town where needs have always been the same.

When Jah Wobble grew tired of PiL, it was already too late, the story had already been branded, and John Lydon, the one who, only a few years earlier, with an Irish accent, claimed to be the Antichrist, understood that the past is past, that Wobble was and remains irreplaceable, and so you can only change the book. Turning the page isn't enough. In a simple decision, which involved the exclusion of the bass, the leading instrument of PiL’s music, and in confronting the limit and the desire for something new, "Flowers of Romance" was born and moves.

"Flowers of Romance", released in 1981 by Virgin, is the quintessential post-Punk album, of what it was, what it could have been, and what will never be again and never was. The boundary from which there is no escape. Imagine an album made of nightmares, with the color and odors of nightmares. A dreamy and poignant record, composed 90% by drums and percussion alone, with some splashes of synths and guitars, just to keep anyone from getting upset, while John Lydon delivers his monologue-soliloquy with the voice of someone condemned to life for life. And the rhythms of industrially post-modern society are all here. Here is the sound your cities make when they turn off the streetlights and everything sleeps, when you know there is no one, but at the same time you know they will be there tomorrow. But do they sleep or have they never been awake? Sleeping is a bit like dying; some people always sleep. I never sleep, and Lydon doesn't answer. He talks, but he doesn't respond. It's all in the grooves of this oppressive and liberating album.

I think I haven’t slept, I listened all night to "Flowers of Romance." Maybe I didn’t sleep, I don’t remember, but it would be the same anyway.