"Jonas Stein and John Eatherly, the guitarist and drummer of female-fronted punk band Be Your Own PET, have joined up with bassist Jeremy Ferguson and dubbed themselves Turbo Fruits. Their self-titled Ecstatic Peace debut comes a little more than a year after Be Your Own PET was the subject of one of those torrential yet oh-so-ephemeral downpours of summer buzz. The buzz with which Turbo Fruits appear preoccupied, though, isn't necessarily the one derived from a trend-spotting press armed with a dictionary full of seizure-inducing superlatives (though they'll no doubt catch a bit of that, too).
Turbo Fruits are big into getting high, and go about discussing it in a couple of different ways; the 15 songs found on Turbo Fruits are stylistically split. Most of the tracks are fuzzed-out but fast, jangly stoner-punk that sounds kind of like a more aggressive Dead Milkmen born and bred in the bluesy tobacco south. Where the disc really hits its stride, though, is on the mid-tempo tracks that delve into stripped-down, sweaty, dirty rock and roll. The whole disc is held together by Jonas' vocals. Sometimes he sings in a nasal pop-punk grunt. The rest of the time, he throttles his voice down into a gritty faux-blues baritone and sings with a weird inflection that owes some small debt to Sam the Sham's oddball enunciation. Employing a whole vocabulary of unique vocal flourishes, Turbo Fruits "ooh," "ahhh," and sometimes whistle their way through a fantastic debut." - Dusted Magazine
|