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< Turbo Fruits
'Turbo Fruits'
words by Stuart Stubbs
So this is what’s prolonging a second Be Your Own Pet album - the side project of BYOP guitarist Jonas Stein and drummer John Eatherly. Well, yeah, and the fact that their fellow full time bandmates have been finishing school (not college), watching TV and doing whatever kids in America get up to these days. Stein and Eatherly are obviously not keen to have an early rock pit-stop (the pair are just 17 and 19 years old) just yet. Their peers can get on with pep rallies and proms; these two will give Jack and Meg a run for the dirty-blues-tag-team-champions-of-Nashville title. The smart money, as this self-titled debut proves, is on the underdog yoofs.
Jemina BYOP’s teenage wail is, as you’d expect, missed, until one half of new A/A single, ‘Volcano’, slivers in at number 3, boasting the meatiest of simple guitar riffs and a very un-19-year old growl from Stein. Before it races off on a roaring Harley to close, it’s a no necked leather clad monster to pucker up and Mick Jagger around to. Its A/A partner in crime meanwhile is ‘Murder’ - a song that causes you to duck behind the nearest barrel for cover as it ricochets like a high speed shoot out in the Wild West.
Cut ‘Ramblin Rose’ in half and it’s just one of the 15 tracks here that’ll spill particles of early Black Sabbath DNA but it’s the more melodious ‘The Run Around’ that really stands out as an avenue that Turbo Fruits should further venture down. Nodding towards the duo’s love for T Rex, it’s a cowboy glam song of the south that steadily trots along to the crowing of Stein, no longer bellowing like a grizzly 40-year old nicotine fiend and no doubt wearing a diamante encrusted Stetson.
Be Your Own Pet’s debut wore its creators’ ages on its sleeve and was face-slappingly exciting for it. ‘Turbo Fruits’ has that youthful urgency but also a maturity that makes it far more than a side project or an after thought. It’s class!
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