Album Review: Bouquet — 'Feel in Color'

Do you know what it’s like to “feel in color?” That’s the question on the minds of five-piece Des Moines band Bouquet on their latest EP. Across seven tracks, emotions are laid bare, bloody, jagged and raw, while still being hypnotically tender.

Across platforms, the band describes itself as “emotional rock music,” somewhere between post-rock or alternative emo, “melodic hardcore” and a personal favorite, “melodic-post-alternative-19thwave-throwback-contemporary-screaming but also singing band.” From one minute to the next, the same raucous grinding guitars flirt seamlessly with smooth, beachy riffs that call to mind “Cherry-Coloured Funk” á la Cocteau Twins.

All of that is here, living and breathing in Feel in Color, from its instrumental arrangements to its vocal intonations. But labeling feels hopelessly irrelevant here, for a band that is confident and assured on what it wants to be, taking big, stylistic swings that turn the course of each song on a dime, ambient hard rock swerves into guttural screams and back again.

Those abrupt, but deftly done, tone switch-ups are best represented through the song structure. Take, for example, the wistful ambient breaks appearing on the intro “Twilight PM” and penultimate track “Twilight AM.” Both brief auditory moments feel set up to mirror each other as an opener and a closer for the album, starting and leaving the listener with quiet. Instead, Bouquet subverts the album structure initially set, exploding and flaming out with “Daylight (A Confrontation of Hurt).” Just like the roads of emotional betrayal, the path isn’t straightforward, concluded or tied up in a bow.

But what does it mean to “feel in color?” In many ways, the band, led by the heart-wrenching vocal stylings of Nick Booth, seems to posit that it’s to feel things deeply in both love and heartbreak. On the titular track, Bouquet waxes poetically on love: “You are the brush that blends the evening sky.” It’s all beautifully tender, overlaid with the whirring of a film projector, a repeated sonic motif, drenched in nostalgia and grungy home videos. This is the stuff of high school parking garage hangouts and suburban yearning.

Characteristic of the emotional push and pull, the preceding track “Blue Hour (A Stream of Consciousness)” conjures up palpable desperation. Right after a bout of visceral screams, coated in the rawest despair, the angst is brought down to earth by the groundedness of Bailey Fiste’s drumming, the guitar tussling of Max Wold and Jared Coleman, and the bewitching basslines of Elijah Wold. (The album’s lineup is bittersweet, as the brothers Max and Elijah have since left the group.) As the outburst quiets, Booth repeats over and over like an affirmation, “‘Tell me it’s enough.’ Is this how you thought it’d pan out? / ‘Tell me it’s enough.’ Is this where you thought you’d be?”

That sense of pleading is deeply felt and captured across Feel in Color, a perfect storm of contentment and hurt, all wrapped up in the throes of nostalgia and Midwest sun—so much so, it almost feels intrusive to peer inside to listen, as if you’re leafing through someone’s personal diary. But it’s this disarming vulnerability that sticks long after the sonic yells stop ringing in your ears.