“Most of the guys in the band are from Bahrain, which has a really sunny climate, so most of the year around, it’s really hot and sweaty, so there’s a hot and warm feeling,” starts Flamingods founding member Kamal Rasool when asked about the tropical sound to their music. “In terms of psychedelia, we all really love that kind of music and the vibe that it stems from.”
The group recently released their third album, Majesty, a concept album that follows the story of the protagonist Yuka. “When we were writing the album, we looked towards the themes of enlightenment and searching for yourself, finding this power within yourself,” he explains. “We came up with the idea of using this fictional character, who was on this journey, searching for just that.
So the album, is sort of in chronological order, and it follows Yuka’s journey for peril, pleasure and longing. It’s half fictional and it’s half personal, within myself. So, the album’s lyrics are toying with personal ideas, but also trying to tell the story as well. In terms of music, it just seems to work really well, with the record side A being lighter and dreamy, whilst side B phases out and follows the psychedelic notion, it was just an idea we really liked, fusing two sides of a band.”
“From the beginning of the band, the Flamingods project was started as means for taking all these influences from various cultures and places that we’d visited,” he continues. “We’re trying to show this correlation between them, and maybe showing the beauty of cultures coming together.”
Flamingods are famous for having overcome continental barriers by sending files over the internet to each other after recording in separate locations. “The second album was fully recorded using audio files, but, with the third album, it began by using digital files. Eventually we had the benefit of actually meeting up and recording between two studios in London. I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a lot of e-mails back and forth, where you’re trying to understand the other person’s ideas through either e-mails or Facebook chats, it’s just horrible and a really tough thing to do. But, we really didn’t have a choice, Charles and me were living in Dubai at the time we were recording the album, so it was just done out of necessity. But, at the same time, you can definitely hear that as an album, it’s sort of fractured and split between sounds.”
Flamingods, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff. Fri 18 Nov. Tickets: £8. Info: 029 2023 2199 / www.clwb.net
words MANON WILLIAMS