Flasher Find Clarity in Spurts and Bursts on Love Is Yours
Now a duo, the D.C. band often sing quietly where they once playfully sneered, and their guitars often purr where they once roared
When a band loses a member, its whole identity can shift, and questions can linger in the air like the earthy odor after heavy rain. Flasher would know: After the D.C. melodic punk band’s breakthrough debut album, 2018’s Constant Image, bassist Danny Saperstein left the trio, leaving Taylor Mulitz and Emma Baker as a duo. (It might have felt karmic for Mulitz: Saperstein’s departure followed Mulitz leaving the fiery punk band Priests after it crested with 2017’s Nothing Feels Natural.) On Love Is Yours, Flasher’s first album without Saperstein, the now-duo—assisted by instrumentalist and co-producer Owen Wuerker—often sing quietly where they once playfully sneered, and their guitars often purr where they once roared. The album is a portrait of going through change, reckoning with the pessimism that can accompany it and experiencing clarity in spurts and bursts.
You won’t hear any explicit ill will toward former bandmates on Love Is Yours. Instead, the album surveys relationships and the psyche in broad strokes, with revelations popping up and then disappearing, much as they do in real life. Mulitz and Baker often whisper their melancholy into creeping minor-key melodies, and they sound like they’re working through their circumstances in real time, occasionally stumbling on the answers. On the dour rock ballad “All Day Long,” they sing, “Asking too much / Like the answer’s a given,” and it could stand in for the whole album’s journey: seeking truth and struggling to find it. At other points on the track, lyrics including “days are violence” and “thoughts are dull” surface as quickly as they fade: It’s tough to even consider that what lies on the other side of the muck might be defeat.