By: Zak Kolesar
Musicians had ample time over the past year to beta test band ideas via online channels. Friends who may have been living apart had a chance to channel a more logical and safe avenue of passing music long distances than, say, the burned CDs of instrumentals that bandmate Jimmy Tamborello sent Ben Gibbard through the mail to record The Postal Service’s Give Up. One of the album’s standout guest musicians, Jen Wood, was invited to contribute via email. At that time this now outdated form of communication had a revolutionary air to it.
For members of new Columbus alternative rock band Fresh Cut Flowers, they had to find a way to bridge that gap between band members living in Youngstown and the capital city. If the synth-heavy project was going to see life during quarantine, its contributors would have to work around not all being in the studio together. However, something that was already working to the band’s advantage from the jump is that two members of Fresh Cut Flowers (keys player Ethan Schwendeman and bassist Mike Perorazio) have long had a working relationship also as members of Spirit of the Bear and had even just released an LP together near the end of 2020. Even more Columbus musical camaraderie spills over with recording this self-titled EP at Moonlight Audio, co-owned by James Harker and Joe Amadio, who are also both members of Youngstown-turned-Columbus alternative rock outfit Ghost Soul Trio (Harker is also a vocalist and guitarist in Spirit of the Bear).
Although these tracks were originally imagined without any vocal production, it’s hard to discern that given the dense anecdotes presented over the nearly 20-minute EP. Once the audience is introduced to the airy, in-command voice of Miles (Meckling) Logan just 10 seconds into the first track, it feels like we don’t stop hearing his voice over the next 18 minutes, sewing together verse after silky smooth verse.
It’s one thing to have a singing voice made for earworms that bounce around your head all day (“Ghost In The Garden” and “Creature Comforts”), but Logan’s alliteration game—which is not only evident in the song titles—helps push along the personal narrative (“shake your love off like a virus”) he brought to the EP (“Creature Comforts”: “ceremonial-comforts,” “pool-pick,” “devil-dwell”). For a group that was already synth-heavy before Logan’s inclusion, his vocals act as if a whole other synthesizer is being added to the Fresh Cut Flowers equation.
“I would say this process was fairly unique,” Logan said. “For my own project, Tragic Sans, I would normally write all of the songs and then go to my band to flesh them out. On the Fresh Cut Flowers EP, Ethan, Adam, and Mike had already worked the songs out structurally with limited instrumentation. There were no vocal melodies, words or titles. I basically had to fit my sense of melody and lyricism into already constructed songs.
“There were some verses I requested they make longer for the sake of adding more words and a better flow, but, for the most part, I just interjected myself into some masterfully constructed songs. It was like a puzzle half finished I was invited to fit my own pieces into. It was a different way of working and a fun challenge.”
Even though Logan’s voice floats and is patterned with a sprinkle of the singer’s impressive falsetto—which oftentimes steals the show over these five songs—it’s nearly impossible to ignore the transcendent instrumentation that is holding these tracks together like kaleidoscope-colored glue. All the instrumentation—from the crisp drumming patterns, wavey synths, and lively drum fills—acts like guided moving parts, progressively pushing the songs forward without feeling aimless. The waning, synthesized vocal fadeouts and clever time signature switch-ups disguised as spacey breakdowns from tracks like “Ghost In The Garden” call back to the earlier abstract work of indie pop band Glass Animals.
For a group that pieced together this project longdistance and during quarantine, it’s about as polished as you’ll find any project that was birthed out of the pandemic. Much like Gibbard reaching out to Wood and another featured backing vocalist, Jenny Lewis—via email and phone, respectively—to contribute on Give Up, Logan’s inclusion in Fresh Cut Flowers was a match made partially through playing musician telephone. Logan was floated the idea of being involved in the project by Harker and Amadio, who were helping him work on the debut Tragic Sans EP, and shortly after Schwendeman and Perorazio had caught Logan out at a local open mic, they collectively thought his vocals on the Fresh Cut Flowers tracks would be an ideal fit, a missing piece no one knew was missing. This pandemic-era decision now puts Fresh Cut Flowers in a position to reach soaring heights for a freshman act.
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