The Fresh & Onlys‘ LP Play it Strange is the equivalent of taking a trip to the beach. It’s fun, relaxing, you see a few strange things, but all in all, there will be many more trips to the beach so nothing really stands out. The album was just average, nothing stood out from the unorganized clash of instruments and muffled vocals of any other typical garage band. You can almost hear the neighbors saying “turn that noise down!” in the background.

The first track “Summer of Love” is the standard love song, equipped with cooing and chill melodies to create the mental beach in your head. This made for a pretty bland start to the album. A smarter choice would have been the second track “Waterfall”; a charming song about the contrast between television and radio, and possibly the best tune on the LP.

As Play it Strange progresses it becomes evident that it’s not going to get much better, and the musical car is just put into neutral the rest of the album with the exceptions of a couple of songs that stand out from the rest like the John Wayne western sound of “Until the End of Time.”

“Tropical Island Suite” begins like the rest, a standard garage band song with fuzzy vocals, but ends with an epic face-melting guitar riff that is worth the 2:50 wait.

What was most interesting was the song “All Shook Up”, which had a Ramones feel to it. Cohen‘s vocals even sounds like Joey‘s in this particular track. It’s worth a listen to try to draw comparisons to the two. Unfortunately after this, the album takes a frightening turn and all of the remaining songs on the project mush into one big annoying track, and a small pounding headache begins to form.

Play it Strange pretty much played it safe, and stuck in the garage band stereo types including an amateur sound with “frat boy” lyrics, and brought nothing very interesting to the table.

Conclusion: For the second half of the album you may need an Advil.