Turbo Fruits - Turbo Fruits

Turbo Fruits is a solid record from a side project that is nearly as good as the main project.

When I heard that Jonas Stein, lead guitarist for puerile punk band Be Your Own Pet, had a side project called Turbo Fruits with BYOP drummer John Eatherly, and their friend Max Peebles, I had only one question: when can I buy the disc? 

See, Be Your Own Pet is the world’s greatest punk band. The combination of Stein’s slashing dissonant power-chord riffs, Jamin Orrall’s (whom Eatherly replaced when he went to college) scattershot, machine-gun drumming, Nathan Vazquez’s funky bass, and frontwoman Jemina Pearl’s ear-shattering shriek, re-imagined real punk music in a time when the punk aesthetic is bought and sold at Hot Topic. Punk songs are not supposed to have sing-along choruses, are not supposed to be more than three minutes long, and punk bands don’t need to be led by men in their thirties still singing about how much of a drag high school was. The band’s debut, all 33 minutes of it, gave punk music a much-needed kick in the ass. Naturally, the music on Turbo Fruits self titled debut is much like the music found on Be Your Own Pet’s debut, but is a melding of Stein’s punk riffs and aesthetic with more traditional rock forms like the blues and bluegrass.

Clocking in at a svelte 34 minutes, Turbo Fruits begins with “No Drugs to Use” which finds Stein lamenting over a sparse punk riff that he had nothing do, and alas, had no drugs to use. The second track, “Murder,” is about, gasp!, Stein getting away with murder. Simple yes, but what he lacks in the lyric department, Stein far makes up for in conviction. You have to be less than 21-years-old to sing and believe this stuff, and even younger to really grasp it, which makes the music have a sense of fearlessness that can’t be faked.  

With third track “Volcano,” things begin to get interesting. The song is a strange blues-dirge that sounds like it could have been on Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk (Stein even sings in a Beefheart-lite voice) if it weren’t for the fact that the song is about being too stoned. Bluesy Beefheart-leaning material shows up on “The Run Around,” and the aptly titled slow burning closer “The Ballad.” Juxtaposed in the midst of these blues tinged song sketches are some excellent punk-tinged songs with better hooks than many of Be Your Own Pet’s songs. “20th I Was Blue,” with its “girl you’re dead to me,” chorus speeds by so quick you wish it was longer. Same goes for “Devo Girl,” “Poptart” and “Crybaby.”

Turbo Fruits is a solid record from a side project that is nearly as good as the main project. Above anything else, the band’s music represents a youthfulness and fearlessness that not many bands can touch. It will be interesting to see what a few years and some road weariness will do to both of Stein’s projects, as both of his bands operate in a bubble of youth and naiveté, and are better for it. What happens when they lose that? Only time will tell.

(Ecstatic Peace Records)