Peer Review: Fruit Juice, Some Big Stranger

Time travel is certainly a way to get there; I am and have always been a firm believer in bringing up time travel. And that is perhaps what makes this song so powerful, infectious even; the way “Some Big Stranger” by Fruit Juice lets you shrug off decades you probably never had. There is a timelessness that is a timeless mess at play here, a sense that peeling Velvet Underground posters, Mott the Hoople’s “All The Young Dudes” on a warped record player playing at the wrong speed can’t be too far away from wherever this was written. All of which is to say three out of three pizzas or doobies or whatever we are using to rate such things these days. What really captured me is that there seems to be a kind of embedded history to this song—it begins by killing itself, firing up an initial groove before letting it crash into distortion—so, in a sense, it is the ghost of itself. “The song is dead; long live the song!” you might add, jubilantly, nodding your head to it because what a chill, weird insurrection. Something wave-like in the way it slides between verse and chorus, riding its guitar lines, wavering with the keyboard, building and repeating. Sonically, it blends a sort of 70s maximalist approach to arrangements—especially the vocal ones—with some cool lo-fi trimmings, a touch of experiment. It’s beautifully broken in places, which is perhaps the best touch: the way that a crackling invades certain notes, adding to the cool artifice of it all. The combined effect of all this is seductive, and so we are as much a victim of Fruit Juice’s modulations, to this song’s ceaseless motion, as to its layers of sounds and its optimism even. We are caught in it; “I got lost inside the main artery/ I found the blood stream warm and buttery” a plaintive, gorgeous wail. This is beach music for the day California dries up, day-glo for the glam apocalypse: “we feel that that’s not all/ let’s get stranger tonight” they’re singing to us from across time and space.

By Galapagos Now!
(read their review)