Last year, Be Your Own Pet blasted onto the scene with their self-titled album. It was raucous, fun, tight 3-chord punk rock with sassy female vocals, and it was a blast and an easy choice for one of my favorite albums for the year.
After kicking out that album and touring non-stop to support, you’d think the kids in BYOP would be taking a break. Here’s a record that says that at least two of them aren’t ready to sit one out just yet.
Jonas Stein and John Eatherly, the respective guitarist and drummer for BYOP are back with a new project. Teamed up with the mysterious Turbo Max on bass, they are Turbo Fruits, and they are everything Be Your Own Pet is not. Or they are nothing Be Your Own Pet is. However you want to put it, Turbo Fruits rocks as hard as BYOP, but in a decidedly different way.
Blues-flavored Fruits
Absent from the sounds of Turbo Fruits are the tight 3-chord blast tracks of BYOP. The Fruits reach back to a decidedly different chunk of ‘70s music for their sound. They dig up the sounds of the MC5, twist them up with glam-heavy guitar, drop in the occasional hardcore riff and deliver it all with a smoky, blues-tainted rock star swagger.
Despite the fact that their songs are just as tightly compressed as BYOP, delivering 15 sweaty tracks in just over 30 minutes, they carry a looseness to them. The guitars are sloppy, and the way their riffs bleed into one another makes the whole album sound like a well-recorded jam session in a hot sticky garage somewhere on an unnamed Southern backroad. This is especially evident in the stop and start churning of “Volcano”, a song which sounds like the band is feeling it out as they go, gaining momentum slowly until the song becomes unstoppable, a locomotive barreling past tobacco fields on a humid Tennessee night.
The only real element of BYOP carried over is in the form of Eatherly’s drumming. Despite the fact that he’s playing a decidedly different brand of rock, he can’t hide the fact that he’s a frenzied powerhouse, as he hammers his way through fast tunes like the fun, twangy “Murder”, or the furious mayhem of “Devo Girl”.
The recording is a touch on the lo-fi side, which suits them well. If you were to hear this record played without knowing who it was, you’d be more surprised to hear the band is a new bunch of young punks, rather than some dusty discovery by an unknown band, found in the used bins at some nameless record store.
By the time the record wraps up with it’s flowing, trashed out ballad, aptly titled “The Ballad”, I’m having a hard time deciding which band is better, BYOP or Turbo Fruits. They’re decidedly different, yet both are poised to rip it wide open in their own way. If Stein and Eatherly decide to stick with Turbo Fruits and never look back, that will be a shame, but it will be great, too. As long as they’re making music somewhere, I’m going to be happy.
