No need to seek relief from these Fatty Acids
Despite songs about everything from sexual ambiguity to sports, album names like “Stop Berries, Berries and Berries Berries,” and a name like The Fatty Acids, these dudes are as playful as they are serious.
Their press photos are ridiculous and their website looks like something out of Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” lineup. But Milwaukee’s flagship folk-fusion-psychobilly outfit has created another collection of artfully dissonant yet cohesive tracks on its new album, “Leftover Monsterface.”
Many of the songs sound frenzied, chaotic and almost made up on the spot, but the craft itself is calculated.
For the construction of “Leftover Monsterface,” the Acids spent six months in the mixing stage alone before taking it out for professional mastering.
As a result, the hot mess that is “Monsterface” – the wacky song arrangements, weird background hollers, and fits and starts of esoteric rhythms – sounds clean enough to eat off of.
The Casio-conjured stand-alone drumbeat on the album’s lead-off single and opener, “Creature,” takes on a life of its own through six minutes of swelling buildups and bottom drops of first synth, then bass, then guitar and vocals – then at light-switch speed becomes a brass-heavy, epic, post-arena-rock inferno.
Released last month, “Leftover Monsterface” is a sensory overload that is, instrumentally, equal parts pop and experimental. And with such a hysterical backdrop of music, the lyrics have a similar polarizing quality.
It would be easy to dismiss the string of strange phrases as drug-induced nonsense. But upon reading the lyrics, there’s something to grab onto, even if you don’t know exactly the shape and color.
Take the words to “Creature” (presented as prose as opposed to song): “This is the creature we made and then dressed in the winter. Laughing at looks we would get with true even tempers. It would sleep in our beds and would sit at the table content. And on car rides it never whined about stupid cassettes.”
Elusively accessible as it is, “Leftover Monsterface” was funded in part through the Web-based Kickstarter platform, where fans can make pledges to support recording and touring artists.
The album price is listed as $5 (“five bananas,” in Fatty-speak), but you can pay any amount for the record on kickstarter.com.
Or you can download it for free, along with the band’s debut, “Stop Berries, Berries and Berries Berries,” directly from The Fatty Acids website (www.thefattyacids music.com).
Sincerely, The Fatty Acids want you to have the album, even if you don’t get it.