Salt Air Static: 14 Flamingos Unpack Yesterday’s Fair

The music of Victoria—a space where salty air collides with concrete—and the buzzing of the bar after hours provide the backdrop for 14 Flamingos's construction of an engaging and potentially incendiary piece of music. The band’s new single "Yesterday's Fair" is not a declarative cry for your attention, rather it approaches like a cold one that is sweating in your hand while sitting at the bar—slowly making yourself at home before unpacking the furniture in your brain.

The band, traditionally led by Steve Craik, has enjoyed creating tense music from a retro sensibility using a futuristic sound. The bassline on "Yesterday's Fair" is cumbia-based and follows with the same consistent thumping pulse of a heart—one that has beaten against concrete. The same pulsing groove is repeated throughout the song a number of times—not out of laziness, rather as an intentional strategy. The pulse becomes increasingly tight with each successive repetition, while keys blink on and off, and cornet melodies flitter in and out like ashes in the dark. The harmony of the voices also blur together in a nonsensical way through the song as the syntax slowly starts to bend, arriving at points where you hear someone talking their way into a corner.

What is going on here is the opposite of a winner's journey. Instead of coming home victorious, the singer is faced with a sense of loss in the fair is finished, the lights are off, and there is nothing left to do but reflect before closing down the bar for the night.

Fine Art will be released in the near future, and 14 Flamingos have demonstrated that groove can be a vehicle through which complexity can exist without specifically identifying the grooves with the complexities. If you stay long enough, "Yesterday's Fair" will show you what it has.