Wednesday, April 20 2011 8:00 PM
21+ $12.00
Lincoln Hall
“Welcome to the art-punk renaissance”, declared Rolling Stone magazine last year, triumphantly heralding Crocodiles’ debut album. It was all just deserves for a San Diego duo who’d spent years kicking against the mundanity of their sprawling military town. As singer Brandon Welchez remembers it: “My neighbourhood was just so boring that a lot of my friends started doing hard drugs at an early age. A lot of kids were growing up too fast, like, in a gross way…losing teeth. Plus my high school was full of racists and homophobes. Music was an escape from all that.”
Sharing both Brandon’s love for girl groups and punk, and his feeling of small-town-alienation, was guitarist Charles Rowell. Meeting at an anti-fascist rally when they were teenagers, the two have been in countless bands together since.
This has been a decisive year for San Francisco’s The Fresh & Onlys – including invitations to play All Tomorrow’s Parties and then they joined Deerhunter for a UK tour, extensive treks throughout the US, and standout performances at the Woodsist festivals in NY and Big Sur. Keeping with their notorious urgent pace the Fresh & Onlys released a handful of exclusive 7” singles, and Captured Tracks issued the lush and anthemic August In My Mind EP. Now to cap off the year, Play It Strange arrives from the infamous In The Red Records with a tour supporting Clinic across the US to follow. Play It Strange is the third full length album recorded in just over two years since the band’s inception with previous albums out on Woodsist and Castle Face. This newest album is also the first recording done outside the band’s own analog home studio. Hot on the heels of touring and arranging these new songs live, Play It Strange was furiously recorded and mixed in one week with Tim Green (Fucking Champs, Comets On Fire) at Louder Studios in order to better capture the muscularity and depth of the band’s live performances. The Fresh & Onlys newest is a shimmering pop record full of infectious melodic hooks, led by singer Tim Cohen’s hazy romanticism, and the incessantly propulsive rhythms of Shayde Sartin and Kyle Gibson. Play It Strange has an evocative moody swagger that jangles with 80’s guitar pop like the Go-Betweens, Jacobites, or early R.E.M. and a provocative rawness ala Iggy Pop or The Gun Club. The record is saturated with guitarist Wymond Miles sonic textural sprawl full of desert guitar-noir phrases that call to mind Morricone/The Bad Seeds. Play It Strange is an addictive record that will establish the Fresh & Onlys as a band that effortlessly laces together threads of great guitar bands from decades past. They may not be your favorite secret to keep much longer.
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