Chris DeLine

It is not considerably hard to categorize Turbo Fruits as something similar to last year’s sensation Be Your Own PET, especially so considering their sounds are both vibrantly based in a lighter, southern-whipped style of punk, and both self-titled releases come from bands that include drummer John Eatherly and guitarist Jonas Stein. Prefix Magazine‘s Eric Fitzgerald documents the band as “a mixture of surf rock and Bad Brains,” but unlike BYOP (who name check Bad Brains in their debut album), Turbo Fruits play something of a (slightly more) harnessed attempt at recklessness.

To suggest the group’s sound can be attributed to Bad Brains would be an inept comparison, Stein sounding nothing like HR and playing far more rhythmically than Dr. Know. True, the bands are in the same family, but they have far different personalities. Bassist Max Peebles and Eatherly act more along the lines of John Entwistle/Keith Moon, especially so during tracks such as “Know Too Much,” than the punks they are made to sound. It’s alarmingly simple to qualify the act, as it was was with BYOP, with the formula of ____ rock + punk = band name, but the band’s debut album offers so much more than that. Turbo Fruits’ energy is almost the equivalent to that of early ’90s Seattle acts, one that helped introduce punk to a new generation.

The greatest attribute that be can said about the band is Stein’s phenomenal debut as a vocalist, sounding much too gritty to give substance to Fitzgerald’s “surf rock” comments. If Mudhoney’s Mark Arm were dead I might conclude that — based on not merely sound alone — Jonas Stein was Arm reincarnate. And as the album races by, that connection becomes far more apparent: Turbo Fruits sounding more similar to Five Dollar Bob’s Mock Cooter Stew than it does I Against I. And why not? It’s about time grunge got a face lift.

[This post was first published by Culture Bully.]