Kevin Bronson on August 10th, 2020

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If 1980s and ’90s indie-pop is your happy place — and there we mean the stuff of interwoven, chiming and jangling guitars — Exploding Flowers will take you there.

The L.A. quartet’s new album “Stumbling Blocks,” their first since 2011, arrives this week, a bouquet of bittersweet, shimmering psych-pop that in other hands might sound quaint (especially compared to the bluster filling earbuds everywhere) were it not so finely crafted.

Exploding Flowers are piloted by singer/multi-instrumentalist Sharif Dumani, who’s been a side man in so many bands his curriculum vitae might read like the phone book. He’s joined by his former bandmates in the Moon Upstairs, guitarist-bassist Mark Sogomian and drummer Josh Mancell, along with Happy Tsugawa-Banta (keyboards, vibes). The foursome’s bio cites associations such as the Alice Bag band, Future Shoxxx, Sex Stains, Cody Chesnutt, the Lassie Foundation and Ray Barbee, but suffice to say there are more.

Fans of New Zealand pop luminaries such as the Chills and the Bats, Sarah Records bands, the Paisley Underground movement, Big Star and the Slumberland Records catalog will find much to love. (So will deep-divers who trace all those back to bands such as the Byrds and the Hollies.)

Suki Ewers’ (Mazzy Star, Opal) guests on the album closer “Are We So Disposable?” And as a long-player “Stumbling Blocks” picks its moments, suffused in a swirl of guitar and keys one moment and ratcheting up the noise at others, with Dumani always sounding like a kid spending all afternoon in a guitar shop. In Exploding Flowers’ breezy (but not windblown), bright (but not oversaturated) world, it’s a day well spent.

||| Stream: “Stumbling Blocks” and “A Daunting Thought”

||| Also: Stream the whole album here