‘Love Comes Slowly Now’ by The Garbage & the Flowers

Perfectly illustrating why re-releases are a necessary, revitalising force of good in the music world, Fire Records will be reissuing obscure Wellington, New Zealand band The Garbage & the Flowers’ 1997 LP, Eyes Rind As If Beggars, early next year, and I may never have come across their pillow-soft melodies and tender sentimentalities otherwise. How awful that would have been. Mellifluously blending the spare, DIY spirit of The Velvet Underground’s early demos with the sleepy serenades of Low, opening track “Love Comes Slowly Now” finds a brush-tip sensitivity in a simple guitar/voice pairing, and its influence can be followed all the way to such Gen Y indie-folk touchstones as Rilo Kiley’s Take Offs and Landings. Such a sweet sound, left dormant for too long.