ARTIST: The Fresh & Onlys
TITLE: Play It Strange
LABEL: In the Red
GENRE: Indie
SOURCE: CD
BITRATE: 211 kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 36:37
RELEASE DATE: 2010-00-00
RIP DATE: 2011-01-00
Track List
----------
1. Summer Of Love 3:21
2. Waterfall 3:12
3. Until The End Of The Time 3:23
4. Tropical Island Suite 7:48
5. I'm All Shook Up 2:41
6. Be My Hooker 2:20
7. Fascinated 2:29
8. Plague Of Frogs 2:10
9. Who Needs A Man 2:04
10. Red Light, Green Light 3:04
11. I'm A Thief 4:05
Release Notes:
Over the past few years, San Francisco has given rise to a new scene of
garage-pop bands pushing the frustrated proto-punk sounds of the 1960s in
different directions. Girls are indie-pop classicists who hit heartbreak even
when they don't reach for it. Thee Oh Sees take the scrapiest, ugliest sounds on
the Nuggets compilations and run with them. Sonny & the Sunsets play cartoonish
games with the skewed innocence they hear in oldies-radio fare. And then there
are the Fresh & Onlys, who seem in love with the era when garage-rock thud and
folk-rock jangle first fell for each other. The guys in the band aren't
revivalists, exactly, but they are pastiche artists. And in their florid,
carefully orchestrated chug, we hear bits of any number of historical pop
moments: starry-eyed Buddy Holly pep, Byrdsian guitar sprawl, willfully silly
Donovan Mellotron idealism, scraggly Sebadoh sighs, bored Dandy Warhols stoner
glamor.
Since forming a few years ago, the band has kept up a steady stream of 7" and
cassette releases, and Play It Strange is their third LP in as many years. But
this one finds them starting to pull all those ideas into something a little
more focused, something easier to digest. For the first time, they've left the
confines of their home studio, and now they're working with an actual producer--
former Fucking Champs guy Tim Green, who might not exactly be Daniel Lanois, but
he's still a big step for this band. Their smart little melodic flourishes have
always been there, but now you don't have to strain your ear to hear them.
Even at their most straightforward, the Fresh & Onlys still find plenty of room
to play around in the margins of their songs. "I'm All Shook Up" is a relative
rave-up, but organs blurt and bass murmurs deep in the mix, adding melodic
accents to the pounding. "Who Needs a Man" is a swampy rush that ends before you
know it, but the ghostly shades of surf-guitar exotica keep things restless. And
then there's "Tropical Island Suite", this band's shot at eight-minute "Hellhole
Ratrace" grandeur. A straight-ahead, simplistic bash dissolves into muffled
feedbacky noise halfway through, then returns as a slower, strummier lope. It's
as if the band couldn't decide which way to play the song, so they just went
with both ideas.
Singer Tim Cohen has a flat, affectless voice, nowhere near as expressive as
peers like Christopher Owens or even Sonny Smith. But that baritone works nicely
in the middle of the mix, and it's fun to hear him sounding bored of being a
player on "I'm a Thief" or trying to escape information-age overload on
"Waterfall". My favorite line comes on "Be My Hooker": "I can hear the open sea
calling me, but I don't know, I don't know"-- wanderlust and indecision rendered
in one quick, direct stroke. He keeps things concise, and the whole album
finishes up business well before the 40-minute mark. May this band continue to
crank out inventive little nuggets like this long into the future.
www.myspace.com/thefreshonlys