Monde UFO – Flamingo Tower
The brief overture of organ that opens Monde UFO‘s Flamingo Tower feels a little like being woken up by the sounds of an after-midnight creature feature on a local TV broadcast—campy, disorienting, spooky though not exactly scary, and undeniably familiar, even though you’ve almost certainly never heard that particular melody before. But it’s the disorientation that the Los Angeles psych-pop group leans into as leadoff track “Gambled House We’re Wiping Fire (Psalm 1)” takes shape. Over a looping monotone drone, vocalist Ray Monde provides a kind of semi-melodic stoned narration as weird elements of everything from free-jazz instrumentation to an opera diva beam in as if picked up on alien satellites. You might call this cacophonous collage dream pop, but not in the 4AD sense of the term—more like actual dreams, in which the subconscious substitutes confusing symbols for actual fears or anxieties.
Flamingo Tower, Monde UFO’s sophomore album and first for Fire Records, playfully and puckishly interconnects disparate threads of sounds and textures in a manner akin to the best low-power, left-of-the-dial radio broadcast—complete with static and intruding frequency transmissions. Ostensibly descended from the same kind of modular, collagist psych as Stereolab or Broadcast, or even Beck at his weirdest, Monde UFO paste together a record-collector’s ransom of stylistic elements: ’60s-era psych rock, ’90s-era indie pop, Silver Apples pulse hypnosis, Sergio Mendes bossa nova, and so on. It’s no slight or dismissal to describe Monde UFO as a product of their influences—those influences never show up in predictable or expected ways, the band instead opting for an accessibly surrealist haze over straightforward homage.
Moments like “Gambled House” are the exception rather than the rule on Flamingo Tower, the band’s penchant for pop songwriting inevitably rising to the surface even when speckled with noise or atonal saxophone. “Sunset Entertainment 3” is immediate proof of their pop sensibility, a warm and cozy indie pop jangler overlain with scratchy guitar skronk that finds Monde pleading in its bright chorus, “If I could be the one to be the one you like…“. They pare back some of the lo-fi crackle on the mesmerizing psych-pop of “Samba 9,” fire up the sampler and saxophone for a joyful spell of dancefloor hooks on “119,” and find the place where indie pop and Sun Ra’s space jazz meet on the oddball cosmic glide of “Il Mortificanto.”
As often as Monde UFO channel spirits from decades and sounds past, there’s nothing particularly nostalgic about Flamingo Tower. In fact the only sense of nostalgia that I get from it is the feeling of combing through the racks of imports and obscurities at Lou’s Records as a teenager, and the feeling that I might come across something with an immersive and alien sensibility such as this and spend the next month trying to unlock its secrets. With Flamingo Tower, Monde UFO have created a richly layered and endlessly fascinating artifact for the crate diggers and the interstellar travelers alike.
Label: Fire
Year: 2025
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Monde UFO : Flamingo Tower
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