The Garbage & The Flowers

New Zealand Lo-Fi Psychedelic Folk Band

Coming out of Sonic Youth-drenched Wellington, NZ in the early nineties, The Garbage & the Flowers were always going to be an anomaly. Denounced as the fifty-thousandth band to sound like the The Velvet Underground, and even as a Christian band in the local street press, the five-piece nevertheless built up a solid gang of devotees, who claimed their sound to be “unique, fractured, and psychedelic” and ideal to take acid with and get stoned to. Championed by songwriter Alastair Galbraith, they released a critically acclaimed first single, Catnip/Carousel, and double album, Eyes Rind As If Beggars, both on US labels. The latter, with its “sun-burning” and lyrical improvisations found them a secure place in the noise-pop canon. The story of The Garbage & The Flowers, by some measure Wellington's most brilliant pop band, is equal parts classic underground rock'n'roll history – couple forms group, potters around for years not doing very much, lives in its own peculiar world, members come and go, they split up in just enough time to grant them ex-post-facto legend status – and the kind of peculiarity and idiosyncratic behaviour that has me thinking, 'only in New Zealand'. For The Garbage & The Flowers, even though they've resided in Australia for over a decade, still feel to me very much like a New Zealand band, developing their own psychedelic pop sensibility in their own, self-cultivated bubble, existing within their own aesthetic and personal worlds, and emerging from this hotel womb only long enough to take a look at the carapace of mainstream life and think, 'maybe someday, probably never'. - Jon Dale