What Is Your Gender?

The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg – Everyone's in Love and Flowers Pick Themselves

This album was not quite what I expected coming from the same bundle of albums that delivered Converge's Jane Doe and The Blinding Light. There's definitely a similarity in the way they combine punk with spastic time signatures, but whereas Converge and their followers deliver said signatures in the form of angry, raw hardcore, there's no attributing the affected cooing, not dissimilar to that of Morrissey or the dude from Dexy's Midnight Runners, of The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg's vocalist to any genre other than post punk.

Now there's no other vocal style than that one guaranteed to turn me off faster, but I surprised myself by quite liking this album. Despite the sarcastic title it's generally twee and poppy in tone, (but with a good dose of quirky weirdness) and against my expections I found that the serhythmic shenanigans are just as appealing in this format. Even the vocals fit well and didn't bother me.

While most of the songs fit into this upbeat, post punk style Everyone's in Love and Flowers Pick Themselves is stylistically actually pretty schizophrenic. There are periodic blasts of hardcore distortion and one of the middle songs ('Jack and Oscar have a Fight') is, for the most part, indistinguishable from a Mogwai track.

It's a pleasant, succinct little album and it's nice to have a dose of arrhythmia without it being burdened by the turgid melodrama of metal and hardcore.