New Music Review: The Fresh & Onlys’ “Grey-Eyed Girls”

It takes a special kind of album to open with a long-juicy pick slide. Like a stripper working the pole, you can practically see the porno shot, the hand sliding down the guitar neck, by the time it’s done you’re practically begging for the rock to begin.

And then it does, and what you’re listening to is the amazing, jangly, golden yet grimy, dug straight from the fertile musical fount of psychedelic rock/pop/punk goodness of The Fresh & Onlys new album Grey Eyed Girls.

Of course, there are few better cities to live in right now than San Francisco for the fostering of musical creativity – The Fresh & Onlys are only one of the many amazing bands like The Oh Sees, Sic Alps, and The Nodzzz, that have been mixing some killer melodies with crazy sounds.

But while The Fresh & Onlys are a fairly new band, the idea of the band has been around for longer than the recent past. The founding members of The Fresh & Onlys, Tim Cohen (Black Fiction) and bassist Shayde Sartin, started playing together back in 2004 but only started to record in 2008, giving the band’s sound and songwriting a little time to come together naturally, organically if you will – like a musical compost heap beginning to fuse together, gassy and creating heat.

And now that the musical compost has coalesced, when the settings were right, The Fresh & Onlys (which now includes drummer Kyle Gibson, Wymond Miles, and Heidi Alexander) have practically exploded onto the scene – releasing their first full-length, a couple 7” singles, and recently their newest album Grey Eyed Girls, all in the space of a year or so. And they’ve even got songs to spare for their next project – the band’s first full studio album.

What’s more amazing, the folks in The Fresh & Onlys sound perfectly comfortable mixing the best of cute, fanciful melodic pop, grimy fuzzed-out garage rock, and angular, driven punk – think Jarvis Cocker fronting the Buzzcocks or the 13th Floor Elevators mixed with Joy Division, all done effortlessly and in an amazingly loose yet concise way.

Grey Eyed Girls sounds as if it’s been lying forgotten in a dusty garage for 30 years, waiting, lurking, hibernating until the time comes where it springs up, fully realized like Athena from the skull of Zeus, and saves humanity from the legions of annoying, whining, soulless, auto-tuned, blather bands that continue to pass tired, regurgitated sounds off as music to a sad majority of folks today.

Every time Grey Eyed Girls ends, it feels like a song too soon, leaving your ears hungry for that nasty pick slide to start the sound of sonic joy all over again. Give these guys a listen and you’ll be hooked.

The Fresh & Onlys are currently on tour with The Oh Sees, and the whole show is coming through Lawrence on September 23rd at the Jackpot Music Hall (943 Massachusetts). Get there early, get your dancing shoes on, and get ready for some good times.

Listen to “Invisible Forces” by The Fresh and Onlys here
Learn more about the band here