The Pink Fits - Fuzzyard Gravebox
Audio CD - Off The Hip Records OTH 7037
CD release date - Mar 27, 2007
Total time - 28:29
Track listing:
1. Man With No Name
2. Chicken Hawk
3. Angel Eyes
4. Julio
5. Dishwasher Blues
6. Whistling Disco
7. Why? (Don't Ask)
8. Bible Basher
9. Hesitating
10. BBQ Liquor
11. Tuco
Personnel:
Karl Weber - Fender Thinline, harmonica
Lenny Curley - Mosrite
Larry Lorenz - bass
Padraic Skehan - drums
http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/7414060/a/Fuzzyard+Gravebox.htm
From bompstore.com:
The Pink Fits are coming out of the garage and are hunting down the nearest drinking hole near you. Featuring Lenny from Tumbleweed, the Pink Fits are a firey conglomerate of ideas, frustration, bongwater, whiskey and raw energy. They supply the out sound from the beach bound borders of trash, new wave punk and old time rânâb, and mix it in with some swamp mud, fish hooks and sharpened spikes.
Review from i94bar.com:
(4 1/3 beer bottles)
FUZZYARD GRAVEBOX – The Pink Fits (Off the Hip)
A recent live review of these guys raised the hackles of a fellow punter who gently chided that my description of Lenny Curley’s guitar work as “angular” was tarring them with a post-punk brush. For the record, I just think their sounds are more fractured than a porcelain bedpan that’s been the target of a pissing contest between Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but if I had anyone thinking The Pink Fits were The Fall crossed with Wire, then please accept my profuse apologia. The world of The Pink Fits is (once smoky) pubs with sticky carpets, populated by gnarly red-eyed patrons with damaged ears.
The shit on “Fuzzyard Gravebox” is as acrid as a roll-your-own that’s been stubbed out on a pensioner’s piss-soaked doona, only much more combustible. These 11 tracks are less songs than unruly explosions of guitar glop, modulated by frantic rhythms, quavering vocals and spit-ridden wheezes of occasional harmonica. Shades of a steroid-assisted Beefheart abound in the stop-start rhythms, but The Pink Fits also rock in the most direct way and thus avoid the often odious label of “avant garde”.
Some bands fall over themselves to prove their cred by bragging about how quickly they recorded an album, and others just get on and do it. Spitting out an LP in less time than it takes Britney Spears to get through the whole engagement-marriage-divorce cycle isn’t necessarily a plus if your band members can’t focus long enough to put a string on a guitar. The ”Fuzzyard Gravebox” liners proudly put the labour period at just four hours and it’s A Good Thing in this case ‘cos The Pink Fits have honed what they do with plenty of live work. You’d have to ask if producer Brent Williams had enough time to make his first coffee and settle into the comfy chair before the Fits were done and dusted out and down the pub, but the output is proof positive of spontaneity’s upside when practised by the right practitioners.
Live, The Pink Fits might look like a cohort of sensibly-dressed call centre staff on halftime smoko break but there’s no denying their ability to kick the shit out of a sleeping street person when they get behind a microphone. Which is a neat segue into the opening track, “Man With No Name”, which sounds like the Missing Links on bad meth. Rude, crude and just right, its roots are planted in early R & B soil but it’s dirt that’s been poisoned by the territorial pissing of hounds from hell.
The instrumental “Angel Eyes” is clattering guitar skronk anchored by murderous rhythms. “Tuco” is another calmer instro that shuts down the show. The lyrics are sometimes incidental anyway, but hold up on their own amid all the squall. Scholars can absorb them from the liners, as well as via aural osmosis.
I’ve been on a song title trip lately and “Whistling Disco” now figures pretty highly. Lives up to its cleverness, too, in its own quiet way, and sits as a sea of relative calm in the middle of a stormy sea. Then “Why (Don’t Ask)” stutters out of the speakers and you’re back in edgy territory, coming on like the Lipstick Killers’ version of the Detroit Wheels’ “Sock It To Me Baby”. That one apart, “Hesitating” is probably the most overtly ‘60-ish one with rolling snare and a relentless guitar figure. I like it and so should you.
The geography will mean nothing to anyone outside Australia but it’s appropriate that a Wollongong band like The Pink Fits has ended up on Off the Hip, the busiest label in the business whose hometown (Melbourne) is the country’s rockingest city. I don’t know if Spooky, Dropkick or Art School Dropout were in the running but they’re all from the southern capital. Proof that all roads lead there, even if its weather sucks.
- The Barman
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