Last week, the Lo-Fidelity record label announced the kickoff of a Kickstarter campaign to reissue The Throes’ seminal album, All The Flowers Growing In Your Mother’s Eyes (1990), on vinyl. You can learn more about the campaign here.
Sitting firmly on the division between what was alternative (see: modern/college) rock in the 1980s via R.E.M. and U2 and what it would become in the early-1990s, the Virginia-based band The Throes telegraphed the wave that was coming to an appreciative audience. Guitar/vocalist Bill Campbell, bassist Joy Gewalt, and drummer Harold Evans effectively conveyed the difficult transitions from teenage youth to hard, adult realities as well as the comfortable cocoon of an insular faith when lived out in a complex, complicated, and often indifferent world.
Noted music journalist J. Edward Keyes said of the album: “Even the Choir, probably the group’s closest peers in terms of sound and demographic (The Choir’s Steve Hindalong would produce later Throes records) tended to add an element of the mystic even to their love songs, which had the effect of veiling the emotion, like fog around a streetlamp. The love on Flowers instead is like a knife slicing bare skin – real, tangible, painful. It is arguably one of the most realistic and convincing albums about adolescence ever made, because Campbell had a rare knack for capturing the terms in which deep-feeling freshmen actually think – there are metaphors, sure, because that’s the way some of our brains work in our early 20s. But they feel lived-in; Flowers convincingly depicts the longings of heartsick adolescence in a way that feels convincing instead of contrived.”
The vinyl campaign is in its first week and will offer brand new remastering of the recording, five different colorways for the physical pressing, and potentially a rerelease of the band’s previous effort, 1995’s The Era of Condolence, as a stretch goal.
The Kickstarter campaign runs until April 1, 2019.