Little Oil – Sweet Fruit Jar
Genre: Classic Rock, Psychedelic Rock
You probably run a comb through your hair every time you walk out of the house. It’s time-consuming, but who can blame you? People are obsessed with looking good and the world treats you better when you put in the effort. You operate by a similar logic when showering, ironing your shirt or studying the news so that you can jump in on a conversation about world politics when summoned to do so.
The music world is the same and, perhaps, even more obsessed with these seemingly shallow things. Artists need a costume. And somebody needs to clean it. Musicians buy expensive instruments. And somebody needs to tune ‘em. And singer obsess about making an instant impression. For that purpose they exercise and warm up their voices. It’s the same old routine.
But it’s not quite the same when it comes to Little Oil’s “Sweet Fruit Jar,” a funny, trippy End of Days psychedelic-folk song that sounds like the work of someone who’s been asleep and woke up singing. That turns out to be a great approach, a detail that helps the song stand out, together with the Ween-like obsession with strong melodies married to true bizarreness.
dAVID sTRANGE – Mean World
It’s quite possible that Hollywood invented coolness as we understand it. And, the people who used to sell the idea were damned from the start. Watching James Dean even at the time that he was still alive to pe a movie star, must’ve been like watching a walking corpse. He smoked, rode fast cars, and had the expression of someone who’d been deployed to the war lines and had been taken prisoner.
But people loved them, and folks tried to imitate them. I blame my habit of involving two packs of Chesterfield on Mr Dean. But I ain’t sure, myself or other impersonators, got quite the spoils or the tragedies that befell the coolness prophets. If these were the movies, however, you’d have girls falling madly in love, sports cars sold and driven without a license, and wine flowing freely until the early hours of the morning.
If these were the movies, dAVID sTRANGE would be a terrific anti-hero, whispering life advice to charmed fans as he does on “Mean World.” Sure, this is a clever, funny song. But it sounds like it’s taken a lot of beatings and a wee bit of good-old misery to write it. It’s sadness in technicolour. But, it also, fortunately for him, sounds like dAVID sTRANGE has a few fights left in him just yet. Good song!
