Mourning [A] BLKstar
Flowers For The Living
Don Giovanni DL/LP

On first listening, the striking eighth album from seven piece Ohio collective Mourning [A] BLKstar boasts a palpable sense of its own significance. Which is not to say that it feels self-important. Rather, it radiates a dark textured gravitas, a sensorial weightiness, illuminated at times by an ebullient sense of its own place within a Black radical tradition. The group’s “avant-poetics” manifest in a genre-defying blend of influences, straddling jazz, soul, blues, gospel and funk, mixed with elements of poetry, hiphop, electronics and, in the gorgeously expressive trumpet playing of Theresa May, echoes of Fela-era Afrobeat and highlife.

Co-founded in Cleveland in 2015 by RA Washington, the group’s beatmaker, producer and one of three lead vocalists, their modus operandi from the start has been to honour complex ancestral inheritances while forging potential futures through collective creative action and notions of spiritual uplift. Named after David Bowie’s final album, 2016’s Blackstar, in homage to one of vocalist James Longs’s favourite artists, the group’s sprawling, intergenerational, mixed gender line-up, likened at times to George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, is fuelled by an Afrofuturist intent, focused as much on repairing social and political injustices as on more meditative, sometimes cosmic levels of transcendence.

In spite or perhaps because of such inclinations, a sense of grief pervades Flowers For The Living, as it did 2024’s Ancient//Future, 2020’s The Cycle and 2019’s Reckoning. Marking their ten year anniversary, the album takes off from a quote often misattributed to Anne Frank: “Dead people receive more flowers than the living because regret is stronger than gratitude.” That sentiment resonated strongly with Washington, who, along with vocalist and lyricist LaToya Kent, formed the group in the aftermath of a close friend’s killing. More recently, he took a vow, in the wake of further bereavements, to show appreciation to friends while they were still alive – a perspective shared by May, who, independently of him, had posted the phrase to social media, prompting them to discern a possible spiritual connection at play.

The dynamics of the resulting album, with its mix of mourning and hope, melancholy and joy, are perhaps best conveyed in the standout opening track “Stop Lion 2”. A melodic trumpet intro heralds an uptempo groove, over which Kent’s unshowy vocals deliver a call to arms against our own complicity in the current dystopian order. The title’s play on words leads to other metaphorical sleights of hand, and while at first, the mood seems celebratory, it is undercut by the arrival of agonised male voices, most notably the fleeting but searing intervention from guest vocalist – and labelmate on Don Giovanni – Southern rocker Lee Bains, of Lee Bains & The Glory Fires.

On the title track, lilting vocals, flowing over mid-tempo rhythms, propose ways to strengthen ties and nurture personal relationships amid environmental crises. Elsewhere, a more downbeat mood is conveyed through the plangent melodies of “Letter To A Nervous System”, in which a haunting trumpet refrain intersperses with Dante Foley’s leisurely drumming, his beats dropping like a series of slow sobs. “Let ’Em Eat” meanwhile builds languidly towards the brief, mutated vocals – like crushed metal filings – of rapper Fatboi Sharif (the only other guest vocalist to feature in the group’s career), while the track as a whole evokes perhaps a weary sense of disillusionment at migratory displacements over multiple spaces and times. A more affirmative invocation of cosmically aligned ancestral networks runs through “Legacy To Begin”, a two part song that suggests the richness of a mini-drama.

As with its predecessors, the struggle against police brutality remains a key concern. On the penultimate track “Lil’ Bobby Hutton” – named after the 17 year old who in 1966 had been the first person to join the Black Panther Party, before becoming, less than two years later, its first member to be killed by police – a mix of propulsive rhythms, grainy production and visceral vocals resurrect the urgency of a Civil Rights era protest song, complete with lyrics expounding the need to talk of terrible things, to speak truth to power.

For much of the past few years, the group have toured as backing band for experimentalist Lonnie Holley, honing their improvisational skills while also perfecting their own songs through a rigorous regime of live performance and rehearsal. Flowers For The Living however is their first album crafted primarily in the recording studio. The method has given space for each performer to contribute to songwriting on an equal level. But the result sometimes feels a little underpowered. While there is a spontaneity at work, an organic, raw immediacy to much of the recorded material, there is also the presence of another album, the ghost of what might have been, haunting its grooves.

Nonetheless, with the passion of some of the earlier tracks giving way to more unsettled reflections on the state of things, the album’s unresolved tensions force us to engage more closely with the disturbed and disturbing nature of present realities, making for an ultimately disquieting though at times emotionally resonant album.

This review appears in The Wire 497 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.