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The Fresh and Onlys Play It Strange

If being selected as one of the albums to listen to of 2010 were really a contest (which it kind of is) then 1st prize for most uninteresting and God-blowing album art goes to Kanye West (lol). Second prize goes to The Fresh and Onlys Play It Strange. There plain hain’t nothing that is as fun as basketball is about it. Period. Luckily album art having to do with how good something is is not the case. The look of an album has little to do with the merits of how it sounds or what exactly might be going on. Now, this may sound really weird because “of course the album art has to do with it!!!” Most of the time you’d be right. Most anything of consequence should at least be making a joke about the art or about the album, or, for pete’s sake, at least have it relate in some way. *NOTE to bands: if you only think your album art looks cool, maybe you should worry more about the entertainment aspect of your group like the Gorillaz or Wavves or something. (I don’t know, it’s your band)*

Play It Strange is another really nice record for 2010. It’s all about remembering that America is still America and that means America is BIG. It so big it hurt, big. I hear it so big that big wants it’s big back. A lot of music busting the American blogs up with slung shot pebbles instead of bullets are these pastoral groups like The Smoke Fairies or Iron and Wine or some other bearded jerk-off – if a male – or fringe haircutted cunt -obvioulsy female- wearing a pair of cowboy boots talking about what it’s like to love a person while standing on a street corner. My mother has told me that if you don’t have something nice to say then don’t say nothing at all. Well, then, I guess I will just say that there are a lot of people from big cities writing songs about falling in love and pretending to be from a farm. The idea of it is actually a cool one , but apparently no one has gotten the memo that both literal interpretation of either actual country records or literal interpretations of the “mood” of your favorite country places are not 1. exciting 2. sounding pretty cool or 3. the owner of any testicles whatsoever.

Introducing The Fresh and Onlys. The guys that kind of get “it” and get “it” right. What is the “it” am I talking about? Well, “it’s” the not making really boring soundtrack music for an equally bad, yet to be imagined independent film that would end up wasting your time, or not tell you any jokes. The Fresh and Onlys’ Play It Strange is that movie about a surfer kid from Cali who moves to Ohio only to bring his savvy surfer know how to aggressive inline skating. This gets him the girl and pwns the preps. Not to leave Play It Strange at that but this is about it. What it’s really kind of like as well is a show, of which we cannot totally remember, about a kid from Ohio in the 60’s who is forced to move to Califonia, learns how to surf and starts to exhibit super powers – like predicting the weather, and calling upon elements and such. We may be hallucinating here but this surfer-goes-country trope found in The Fresh and Onlys’ Play It Strange is pretty cool. It’s a nice sensibility and much more American Rock than most other bands that try.