The Fresh & Onlys - House of Spirits

The Fresh & Onlys
House of Spirits
10 June 2014
Mexican Summer

3 stars out of 5

 

“The purpose of living is all in your mind,” sings Tim Cohen on “Animal of One,” the fourth track on House of Spirits, the fifth LP by San Francisco psychedelic garage band The Fresh & Onlys. Well, from a purely biological point of view, I would suggest that the purpose of living is all in your pants, though if your brain is in your pants, I guess that amounts to the same thing. Regardless of where your thinking meat is, it would still find House of Spirits to be a serviceable slab of psychedelic revivalism. There’s hints of the Grateful Dead here, though The Fresh & Onlys have more in common with Brooklyn contemporaries Woods than with the venerated saints of their home city’s storied past.

The F&Os operate within a realm where profundity is traditionally found in substances that accompany the music, rather than in the music itself. And hey, to each his own, dude. (I say this with sarcasm; I’m totally judging you.) House of Spirits is somewhere in the grey area. While from the lyrics it’s clear that Cohen is more poet than flake, as Nietzsche said, poets “muddy their waters to make them appear deep.” Except in rare instances (such as the noise-infused “Madness”), the music of House of Spirits is still mired in the mud of the psychedelic past.

To review: purpose, brains, pants, drugs, mud; grey areas, neutral ratings; poets, philosophers, psychedelia (note the false alliteration: three initial p’s, but three different initial sounds—clever, huh?); comparisons to the Grateful Dead (good), Woods (bad), balancing out to zero; judging; judging more harshly.

reviewed by Richard Krueger